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Re: Comparison of Mathematica on Various Computers


Renan wrote:

> On 2/10/06, fizzy <fizzycist at knology.net> wrote:
>> Can someone explain why AMD does so well on this test and Pentium does so
>> poorly by comparison??
>> I am planning to buy a new  computer and these tests seem to indicate
>> that a Mathematica user should buy an AMD machine.
> 
> I'd guess that an Athlon 64 CPU is faster than a Pentium 4
> (32-bit).(most AMD CPU's that I see in the benchmark are 64-bit)

hm, I hoped for good answers to that, but my guess is also that it is the
64-bit vs. 32-bit which explain the difference to a big extent. Obviously
it will be less often necessary to use software arbitrary precision
arithmetic and when you have to it should be a big advantage to be able to
work with words of double size.

Maybe it would be worth to check whether there are "unfair" tests within the
benchmark like numerics with a precision which can be done in hardware on a
64-bit processor but needs to be done in software on a 32-bit processor?
This is just another case where just a single number is not enough to
decide whether one or the other computer is faster for what you want to do
with it. So you should probably look into the results for specific parts of
the benchmark if that's possible...

> Does Mathematica support special instructions like SSE?

no idea...

albert


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