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.