MaplePrimes - answers and comments on Question, New computer for programming

real estate

Christopher2222 — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:24:03 Z

Personally I like a lot of screen real-estate, I would consider 15" and up. I can't really offer any advice.

But read this thread as well http://www.mapleprimes.com/posts/35665-New-Laptop-Advice

dual core vs quad core

Christopher2222 — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:44:51 Z

Really I think the trade offs are equal.

On one hand you're deciding between 2 cores or 4 cores but also at the expense of processor speed 2.2Ghz. vs. 2.7Ghz, however the quad core is capable of setting up more threads, again it depends on the type of calculations and if they are seperable or not.

The 2670QM has more cache available which would also decrease calculation times (cache memory is faster, hence the less time you spend reading and writing to main memory, the better)

The 2620M at 2.7Ghz will calculate quicker than the 2.2 Ghz 2670QM in consecutive calculations. However on parallel calculations the 2670 is better and it's also newer. It's a toss up really.

thanks

felipe_p — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:57:40 Z

thank you for your input. I read the thread but it didn't help me musch as the discussion seems to be wether to go from amd to intel or not. What I really wanted to know is if there will be clear performance differences between the two processors I mentioned.

solved!

felipe_p — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:55:31 Z

That's want I wanted to hear! I think I'll stick to the dual core as I have no experience with parallel processing yet so I think (at least on the short term) I'll get most from the 2620M.

Thank you for your reply :)

multi-core

Christopher2222 — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:37:56 Z

@felipe_p It is not necessary to know parallel programming to take advantage of all of the cores. Maple 15 works behind the scenes to take advantage of any available processing power (not sure how efficiently but always improving with each version).

The 2.7Ghz will calculate faster than the 2.2Ghz on a 1:1 basis. On some calculations it would be 2:4 (almost twice as fast with the quad core - but again only if parallel can be done behind the scenes)

Documented from the what's new for Maple 15

"Maple takes advantage of the full processing power of your computer, automatically detecting and using all available processor cores to perform many computations in parallel. You do not nee to do any special programming, change any options, or even know how many cores your computer has! in Maple 15, many fundamental operations can be done in parallel, so your results are available much faster and you can tackle larger problems.

As an example Maple 15 automatically parallelizes many polynomial operations. Since polynomial operations are used extensively throughout the Maple library as part of other computations, many different operations will also benefit from this parallelism."

However without seeing benchmarks for Maple on these specific processors to get some idea, it would be really hard to choose. It would be nice to hear other maple users opinions on the subject and perhaps even submitting some values for comparisons. In any case I think either of those processors make a fine choice.