Re: $10K Mathematica Machine
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg76970] Re: $10K Mathematica Machine
- From: Antti Penttilä@smc.vnet.net
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:16:16 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: University of Helsinki
- References: <f3gqm6$41g$1@smc.vnet.net> <f3jgf0$d5v$1@smc.vnet.net>
Hi, With number theory computations, you probably won't be able to benefit from more than one CPU core. Still, buy a dual core machine since it will be much more stable in doing something else while you compute with Mathematica. As others have pointed out, get a 64bit OS and lots of memory. I think that the performance of Mathematica and its libraries could be better with Windows or Linux OS rather than with Mac. Number theory and Mathematica will probably need lots of integer computing. I would recommend you to check the best current processor for integer performance from http://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cpu2006;op=form Search for computers with processors less than 3 and sort by result. Look for the best result in CINT2006 test. At the time the best seems to be the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor with a score of 18.5, followed by a bunch of Xeon processors (e.g. Intel Xeon 5160, score 18.1). Antti