I recently ordered a computer which is intended to run both WindowsXP and Linux (of course both versions of R as well). Before placing the order, I discussed it with our system managers. They highly recommanded a system with one P4 CPU with Intel's so called "hyper-threading" technology over a system with two CPU's, and they claimed that both OS's can take benefits from the "hyper-threading" technology. I haven't got the machine yet and don't know how fast it is. At least this is another option available.
Paul.
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
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.
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