On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Amit Ghosh wrote: > I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under > Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for useful hints > about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I found no recent > topics.
Most of seem to be buying dual Opterons, not least so we can potentially access more than 4Gb. > As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that there should be > no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine. It certainly can use a threaded BLAS. You can also do two simulation runs simultaneously (and surely you will be doing more than one run?). > So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, Pentium 4, > Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related benchmarks or should > one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results (SPEC, etc.)? Any > hints or experiences would be appreciated! It really does depend on what exactly your computations do. There are R `benchmarks', but they are not typical tasks (for me, and probably for no one else). I would buy either a dual Athlon MP or a dual Opteron, and not worry too much about this -- anything you buy today will look slow next year, and you are not likely to see differences as large as 2x on one processor. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
