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Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg101279] Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?
• From: WetBlanket <Wyvern864 at gmail.com>
• Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:30:56 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <h1qcu0$7u9$1@smc.vnet.net> <h24qpp$rg4$1@smc.vnet.net>

On Jun 27, 5:03 am, underante <undera... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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 i=
t as a
> > "subnotebook/netbook".  If you were looking for speed first and porta=
bility
> > 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 go=
als, 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 ma=
trix
> multiplication process  etc. with cpu usage maxing at 100%. for Mathema=
tica
> v7.0 however this trick has no effect and benchmark stubbornly remains
> fixed at 0.32 with maximum cpu usage 50%.

I concur with the Dell XPS recommendation.  I use a Dell XPS 2010.  It
is fast, has a dual-processor and  has a large screen.