laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?
underante
perhaps someone can recommend me a laptop to run Mathematica fast?
i bought a asus eee pc 901 recently, which tho very cute pink and
quiet, (when the fan is off anyway!) it does return a rather
disappointing internal benchmark of around 0.32 for both Mathematica v7 and
v5.2 with windows XP.
what with Moore's law and all that i had vaguely reckoned that in 2009
a new machine should be running a lot faster than that since i have a
circa 2001, 8 years old 1 GHz pentium dell inspiron laptop with
128Mbyte of RAM that benchmarks Mathematica 5.2 at 0.27 under windows ME, so
that the small increase in speed that i do see could be wholly put
down to the intel atom N270 in the asus running that little bit faster
at 1.6 GHz.
anyway, i am looking to buy a somewhat bigger screened laptop in the
next few weeks, so if you have, or know, of something that will run
the internal Mathematica v7.0 benchmark at, well, lets say, 3.0 or more?, i.e.
about ten times faster than what i have now, i would be very
interested to know what make and model it is, as i have had little
luck so far trawling the web for such info, and tho the wolfram
benchmark report mentions various intel xeons running at speeds of
3.75 or more i cant say ive ever seen a laptop with one of these
chipsets inside it, and no mention whatever is made of these
ubiquitous intel core 2 duo things, quadcore or not, or what i could
expect from them.
thankyou
f.c
(oh, i would just add that since i will be using the machine for other
things besides mathematica it would be best for me to continue with
windows a while longer, but if you get a nice turn of speed under
linux or mac OS please feel free to say so!)
Mark Fisher
> hello,
>
> perhaps someone can recommend me a laptop to run Mathematica fast?
>
> i bought a asus eee pc 901 recently, which tho very cute pink and
> quiet, (when the fan is off anyway!) it does return a rather
nd
> v5.2 with windows XP.
>
> what with Moore's law and all that i had vaguely reckoned that in 2009
> a new machine should be running a lot faster than that since i have a
> circa 2001, 8 years old 1 GHz pentium dell inspiron laptop with
so
> that the small increase in speed that i do see could be wholly put
> down to the intel atom N270 in the asus running that little bit faster
> at 1.6 GHz.
>
> anyway, i am looking to buy a somewhat bigger screened laptop in the
> next few weeks, so if you have, or know, of something that will run
i.e.
> about ten times faster than what i have now, i would be very
> interested to know what make and model it is, as i have had little
> luck so far trawling the web for such info, and tho the wolfram
> benchmark report mentions various intel xeons running at speeds of
> 3.75 or more i cant say ive ever seen a laptop with one of these
> chipsets inside it, and no mention whatever is made of these
> ubiquitous intel core 2 duo things, quadcore or not, or what i could
> expect from them.
>
> thankyou
>
> f.c
>
> (oh, i would just add that since i will be using the machine for other
> things besides mathematica it would be best for me to continue with
> windows a while longer, but if you get a nice turn of speed under
> linux or mac OS please feel free to say so!)
I got a BenchMark of 3.65 on my Lenovo W500 using version 7.0.1. I'm
running Windows XP Pro (32 bit). I've got 3GB RAM. The chip is Intel
Core Duo T9600 @ 2.8GHz. The laptop is about 9 months old. I'm
guessing you can do better with the newer chips.
--Mark
Syd Geraghty
If you want the best laptop for Mathematica you should seriously look
at the new Apple MacBook Pro when OS Snow Leopard comes out this
September.
Snow Leopard will allow WRI to take advantage of CPU & GPU performance
and you will get a full 64 bit OS and 8 GBytes of memory.
WRI will be one of the first apps to support Snow Leopard.
Then if you can spring for a desk side as well go for a Mac Pro with 8
Nehalem CPUs and 16 threads supported as well as room for two GPUs ...
this will be a state of the art workstation for the next few years.
Have fun ... Syd
Syd Geraghty B.Sc, M.Sc.
Mathematica 7.0.1 for Mac OS X x86 (64 - bit) (18th February 2009)
MacOS X V 10.5.6
MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM
On Jun 21, 2009, at 4:04 AM, underante wrote:
> hello,
>
> perhaps someone can recommend me a laptop to run Mathematica fast?
>
> i bought a asus eee pc 901 recently, which tho very cute pink and
> quiet, (when the fan is off anyway!) it does return a rather
> disappointing internal benchmark of around 0.32 for both Mathematica
> v7 and
> v5.2 with windows XP.
>
> what with Moore's law and all that i had vaguely reckoned that in 2009
> a new machine should be running a lot faster than that since i have a
> circa 2001, 8 years old 1 GHz pentium dell inspiron laptop with
> 128Mbyte of RAM that benchmarks Mathematica 5.2 at 0.27 under
> windows ME, so
> that the small increase in speed that i do see could be wholly put
> down to the intel atom N270 in the asus running that little bit faster
> at 1.6 GHz.
>
> anyway, i am looking to buy a somewhat bigger screened laptop in the
> next few weeks, so if you have, or know, of something that will run
> the internal Mathematica v7.0 benchmark at, well, lets say, 3.0 or
> more?, i.e.
John Fultz
"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 have an Eee PC, too, which serves me
very well. I have Mathematica and a couple of other CPU-sucking applications
on it. But I understand that, if I expect to use them, I'm going to be
engaged in some thumb-twiddling. That's the price I pay for a six hour
battery life in a two pound package.
On the other hand, there's a lot more variety in laptops. Some laptops favor
portability strongly, some favor performance strongly, and some attempt to
balance the two (this is a gross simplification...there are other factors, too,
but you get the idea). I don't follow laptops on a regular basis, so I
couldn't give you any helpful suggestions for what's on the market now.
But I replace my own laptop about every three years, and I never have
trouble finding something in the $2500-$3300 range with a nice large screen,
decent sized hard drive, and reasonably fast CPU. Such laptops are
available from all of the major vendors (e.g., Dell, Lenovo, Apple).
And in the modern day and age, dual core is standard even in many of
the cheaper laptops.
Good luck in your shopping.
Sincerely,
John Fultz
jfu...@wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.
WetBlanket
Try Dell's XPS series for a large screen large format fast laptop.
underante
> 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
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%.
WetBlanket
> On Jun 23, 12:05 pm, John Fultz <jfu...@wolfram.com> wrote:
>
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=
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.