i5 Dual core vs. i7 Quad core for MATLAB?

Const451

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Feb 26, 2010, 6:41:21 PM2/26/10

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I am buying a new laptop that I'll be using for MATLAB. Hence, I have a question, what processor would be better for MATLAB performance, i5-520M dual core 2.4 GHz or i7-720QM quad core 1.6 GHz? Given, I'll be using parallel computing toolbox.

Thank you!

Const451

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Mar 2, 2010, 7:17:05 PM3/2/10

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Any takers, please?

eBoy

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Mar 4, 2010, 8:19:17 PM3/4/10

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On Mar 2, 7:17 pm, "Const451 " <const...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any takers, please?

Have the same question, seems like nobd really knows... (or cares)

John D'Errico

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Mar 5, 2010, 12:06:19 AM3/5/10

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eBoy <kefa...@gmail.com> wrote in message <a9f98e63-505d-4bee...@q21g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>...

> On Mar 2, 7:17 pm, "Const451 " <const...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Any takers, please?
>
> Have the same question, seems like nobd really knows... (or cares)

It is not that nobody cares, but few people have the
specific information you desire.

I will say that my new 2.8 GHz i7 quad core is quite
fast. If you are looking for parallel processing capability,
then it makes sense to have as many cpus as you can.

John

omegayen

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Mar 5, 2010, 3:56:09 AM3/5/10

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"John D'Errico" <wood...@rochester.rr.com> wrote in message <hmq3gb$t5v$1...@fred.mathworks.com>...

I personally would say go with the i5 as it may be able to outperform the i7 in single threaded applications. matlab still has not made everything in it multithreaded. however if you know you will be able to take advantage of multithreaded algorithms then i would say i7

Marcio Barbalho

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Mar 5, 2010, 4:56:22 AM3/5/10

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I'd go for 'i7 quad core' as well. I have one of such machine at work, it's pretty fast, MATLAB works great on it.

Walter Roberson

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Mar 5, 2010, 12:07:40 PM3/5/10

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omegayen wrote:
> "John D'Errico" <wood...@rochester.rr.com> wrote in message
> <hmq3gb$t5v$1...@fred.mathworks.com>...
>> eBoy <kefa...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>> <a9f98e63-505d-4bee...@q21g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>...
>> > On Mar 2, 7:17 pm, "Const451 " <const...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > > Any takers, please?
>> > > Have the same question, seems like nobd really knows... (or cares)

>> It is not that nobody cares, but few people have the
>> specific information you desire.

The answer is going to change depending on _exactly_ what kind of work
you do most in Matlab -- and might change again in a later Matlab
release that uses the instruction sets differently.

tomshardware.com has had some excellent testing articles comparing
performance for i5 and i7 systems for varying tasks.

By the way, these days it isn't as easy as saying "i5": the new i5's
that Intel released have a fundamental computational difference from the
previous i5's, and are better for some tasks and worse for other tasks.

While you are looking on tomshardware.com, I would recommend scanning
the relatively new review articles on computation versus energy
efficiency: the high-end i7 quad core has the greatest absolute compute
power, but getting there uses several times the energy of some of the
other systems, and thus requires much greater cooling power. Thus when
you consider computation per dollar, some of the other systems are much
more cost-efficient... depending on your needs, buying multiple of the
slightly slower but cheaper systems and doing distributed processing
might get you the most computation for the money.

Const451

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Mar 7, 2010, 9:21:09 PM3/7/10

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Thank you for the input!

You're right, it's probably that some MATLAB apps are better and others are less optimized for parallel processing. I'll be using symbolic, statistics, and financial toolboxes.

It's just I've seen on some other forum people saying that MATLAB is not optimized yet to take advantage of four cores, only two. I do not know how much truth in that but it would be good to see some test results of MATLAB performing on two and four core systems.

Thank you.