MathGroup Archive 2009

[Date Index] [Thread Index] [Author Index]

Search the Archive

Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg101226] Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?
  • From: underante <underante at yahoo.com>
  • Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:03:51 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <h1qcu0$7u9$1@smc.vnet.net>

On Jun 23, 12:05 pm, John Fultz <jfu... at wolfram.com> wrote:
> Most people wouldn't consider the Eee PC a laptop.  Wikipedia lists it as a
> "subnotebook/netbook".  If you were looking for speed first and portability
> second, you're at the wrong end of the hardware scale.  The design of netbooks
> factors portability and battery life as strong primary and secondary goals, withperformance as a distant tertiary goal. . . .

i begin to think that those most people are right! before all this
started i had just assumed that these little netbooks were just little
laptops you could lift with one hand, ran for ages and fit inside a
handbag. (so, ok, i admit it, i have a fondness for large tapestry
handbags, with fringes, does this necessarily make me a frivolous
person? -- no, do not  answer that!)
but in one of the emails people most kindly sent on this matter was a
pointer to  http://www.cpubenchmark.net/  , a website that collates
lots of cpu's benchmarks and shows that the little intel atom N270 in
my asus  eee pc scores just 305 compared to typical numbers of  2000
and higher for those core 2 duo things, so  with the benefit of the
hindsight it is unsurprising perhaps the rather poor showing of 0.32
in the internal Mathematica v7.0 benchmark the asus gets.
. . .  and yet, and yet . . . the now ancient 2.4 GHz pentium 4
scores only 231 in those same cpubenchmark tests, slower than the
atom, but yet still has a Mathematica benchmark of 1.0, or 3 times more
speedy! comparisons are odious to be sure, but for me at least this
performance still is most puzzling and makes the choosing of a real
laptop that much harder, so if anyone else would care to post their
laptop Mathematica benchmark here i think that could be most helpful
but, never mind! may i extend a big hug to everyone who has posted
here or emailed to me on this subject? it was most kind of you all to
expend time and effort on this matter.

a big thankyou

f.c.

P.S as a complete  aside i should perhaps add that by using that
OMP_NUM_THREADS =  %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS% environmental variables
trick mentioned in this group many moons ago, i can tweak the eee pc
benchmark for Mathematica v5.2 up to 0.44 and use both threads for the matrix
multiplication process  etc. with cpu usage maxing at 100%. for Mathematica
v7.0 however this trick has no effect and benchmark stubbornly remains
fixed at 0.32 with maximum cpu usage 50%.


  • Prev by Date: Re: interpolation and to extract between 3D plots
  • Next by Date: Re: Re: display of graphics primitives
  • Previous by thread: Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?
  • Next by thread: Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?