On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Stefan Grosse wrote: > 64bit does not make anything faster. It is only of use if you want to > use more then 4 GB of RAM of if you need a higher precision of your > variables > > The dual core question: dual core is faster if programs are able to use > that. What is sure that R cannot make (until now) use of the two cores > if you are stuck on Windows. It works excellent if you use Linux. So if > you want dual core you should work with linux (and then its faster of > course).
Not necessarily. We have seen several examples in which using a multithreaded BLAS (the only easy way to make use of multiple CPUs under Linux for a single R process) makes things many times slower. For tasks that are do not make heavy use of linear algebra, the advantage of a multithreaded BLAS is small, and even from those which do the speed-up is rarely close to double for a dual-CPU system. John mentioned simulations. Often by far the most effective way to use a multi-CPU platform (and I have had one as my desktop for over a decade) is to use coarse-grained parallelism: run two or more processes each doing some of the simulation runs. > The Core 2 duo is the fastest processor at the moment however. > > (the E6600 has a good price/performance ration) > > What I already told Taka is that it is probably always a good idea to > improve your code for which purpose you could ask in this mailing > list... (And I am very sure that you have there a lot of potential). > Another speeding up possibility is e.g. using the atlas library... > (where I am not sure if you already use it) > > Stefan > > John C Frain schrieb: >> *Can I extend Taka's question?* >> ** >> *Many of my programs in (mainly simulations in R which are cpu bound) on a >> year old PC ( Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz or Dell GX380 >> with 2.8Gh Pentium) are taking hours and perhaps days to complete on a >> one year old >> PC. I am looking at an upgrade but the variety of cpu's available is >> confusing at least. Does any one know of comparisons of the Pentium >> 9x0, Pentium(r) >> Extreme/Core 2 Duo, AMD(r) Athlon(r) 64 , AMD(r) Athlon(r) 64 >> FX/Dual Core AM2 and >> similar chips when used for this kind of work. Does anyone have any advice >> on (1) the use of a single core or dual core cpu or (2) on the use of 32 >> bit and 64 bit cpu. This question is now much more difficult as the numbers >> on the various chips do not necessarily refer to the relative speed of the >> chips. >> * >> *John >> >> * On 06/11/06, Taka Matzmoto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> >>> Hi R users >>> >>> Having both a faster CPU and more memory will boost computing power. I was >>> wondering if only adding more memory (1GB -> 2GB) will significantly >>> reduce >>> R computation time? >>> >>> Taka, >>> >>> _________________________________________________________________ >>> Get FREE company branded e-mail accounts and business Web site from >>> Microsoft Office Live >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> [email protected] mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >>> PLEASE do read the posting guide >>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >>> >>> >> >> >> >> > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- 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://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
