Anyone had any experience running fairly intensive analysis on a new MacPro? I am looking to upgrade my desktop, and 80% of my time is spent in RStudio/Latex/Sweave... working primarily with microbiome analysis (large datasets). Been considering a new MacPro, but I am a little hesitant about; a) moving my desktop to Mac, and b) whether the MacPro performance will be worth the cost (it almost seems geared more towards graphics than anything else).
For some background - I have worked on Macs for years, but moved my main work desktop to Windows about 2 years ago. I also do quite a bit of work in QIIME - which can be done on the mac (not the PC) and is both RAM and CPU intensive... so, I can benefit from multiple cores, large RAM, etc. My 2011 MacBook Pro seems extremely sluggish at this point when running basic tasks (probably need to do a fresh OS install), but the Windows machine has never slowed down. This has added to some of my hesitation. Anyone have opinions/experience using R on the new MacPro? On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Simon Urbanek <[email protected]>wrote: > > On Mar 10, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Nick <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Good afternoon, I am looking at buying my first Mac and thought i'd ask > for advice for what I should get. I have it down to the two models below > (but am open to realistic suggestions). > > > > I will primarily be using R for machine learning packages, and the data > sets are very large. If any other specs are needed let me know. > > > > "data sets are very large' - well, the machines listed below are certainly > not suitable to run anything on large data ;) so you may want to quantify > what you mean here. You want as much RAM as possible for large data since > that is the single item that will cause huge drop-off in performance when > exhausted and R certainly can take quite a bit of memory if this is really > your only machine to run computing on. Note that in modern Apple laptops > you cannot add more memory later, so this is rather important factor. > > Given a choice of the two MacBook Air is not a computing machine - it's > optimized for power consumption, not speed, so the only reason to go for it > is if you're looking for a light notebook and don't care about the > computing speed as much. > > Cheers, > Simon > > > > > Thanks in advance. > > > > 13-inch MacBook Air ($1,349) > > 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz > > 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM > > 128GB Flash Storage > > > > 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina ($1,399.00) > > 2.4GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 2.9GHz > > 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM > > 128GB PCIe-based Flash Storage > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > > _______________________________________________ > > R-SIG-Mac mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac > > _______________________________________________ > R-SIG-Mac mailing list > [email protected] > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
