I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 Ghz. I heard that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So I bought a Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon 2200+ will be twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program and the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly slower than a Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. What is your experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the future? Thanks. By the way, the OS is Windows XP home edtion. Jason ====Jason G. Liao, Ph.D. Division of Biometrics University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey 335 George Street, Suite 2200 New Brunswick, NJ 08903-2688 phone (732) 235-8611, fax (732) 235-9777 http://www.geocities.com/jg_liao
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Jason Liao wrote:> I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 Ghz. I heard > that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So I bought a > Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon 2200+ will be > twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program and > the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly slower than a > Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. What is your > experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the future? Thanks.So I expect you think a P4M 1.4GHz (on which I am writing this) should be a lot faster than a PIII 1GHz? It is often slower. Don't compare laptop chips with desktop ones, nor different chip families (an Athlon 2200 is not 2.2GHz, BTW). PIIIs seem the fastest per GHz, but they don't do many GHz. I am rather pleased with my dual Athlon 2600, but then P4's don't allow multiprocessors and the machine with dual Athlons was cheaper than a comparable one with a single 2.4GHz P4. You have tuned an ATLAS implementation to your CPU, I take it? If not, that's the first step to optimal R performance. -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk 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
Overall performance depends on a few other things besides CPU clock speed (e.g., RAM speed and size, cache size, disk speed, etc.) Unless your code is spending great majority of the time in the CPU, you should not expect speed-up to be equal to ratio of clock speeds. (Also, as Prof. Ripley pointed out, a P4 does less than a PIII at the same clock speed, and the number AMD attach to Athlon is not clock speed.) We do have a dual P4 Xeon 2.4 GHz with 8GB RAM, and jobs run more than twice as fast as my PIII 933MHz laptop. Andy> -----Original Message----- > From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] > Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 4:55 PM > To: Jason Liao > Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch > Subject: Re: [R] Dismal R performance of Athlon moble CPU? > > > On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Jason Liao wrote: > > > I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 > Ghz. I heard > > that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So > I bought a > > Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon > 2200+ will > > be twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program > > and the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly > slower than > > a Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. > What is your > > experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the > future? Thanks. > > So I expect you think a P4M 1.4GHz (on which I am writing > this) should be a lot faster than a PIII 1GHz? It is often > slower. Don't compare laptop chips with desktop ones, nor > different chip families (an Athlon 2200 is not 2.2GHz, BTW). > PIIIs seem the fastest per GHz, but they don't do many GHz. > > I am rather pleased with my dual Athlon 2600, but then P4's > don't allow > multiprocessors and the machine with dual Athlons was cheaper than a > comparable one with a single 2.4GHz P4. > > You have tuned an ATLAS implementation to your CPU, I take > it? If not, > that's the first step to optimal R performance. > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk > 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 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo> /r-help >------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments, ...{{dropped}}
Jason Liao wrote:> I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 Ghz. I heard > that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So I bought a > Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon 2200+ will be > twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program and > the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly slower than a > Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. What is your > experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the future? Thanks. >I've found a big problem with laptops to be slow hard drive speeds; if you're doing any disk read/writes, it's noticably slower. I believe the slower HDs use less battery power, so it makes some design sense to stick with slower drives. For workstations (not laptops) I use Athlon processors whenever possible, and pick HDs that run at a minimum ca. 9000 RPM. I've found the Athlons to give very satisfying grunt per dollar, but you need to have fast RAM, fast HDs, and decent-sized cache to actually realise the full benefits. Cheers Jason -- Indigo Industrial Controls Ltd. 64-21-343-545 jasont at indigoindustrial.co.nz
> From: Jason Liao [mailto:jg_liao at yahoo.com] > > Thanks for Prof. Ripley and Andy for your technical > explantion. It seems that that the real CPU speed has not > advanced as fast as these Ghz or other performance indicator suggest. > > Yes, my program is totally CPU intensive. > > "> We do have a dual P4 Xeon 2.4 GHz with 8GB RAM, and jobs run more > > than twice > > as fast as my PIII 933MHz laptop." > > R can not really use dual CPU for one R session if I > understand correctlyNo, but that machine is being shared by several people. Even if only one person uses the box, it helps to have one CPU dedicated to R, and another taking care of other things. Having 12k rpm SCSI disks and fast RAM helped, too. Andy> > Jason > > --- "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com> wrote: > > Overall performance depends on a few other things besides CPU clock > > speed (e.g., RAM speed and size, cache size, disk speed, > etc.) Unless > > your code > > is spending great majority of the time in the CPU, you should not > > expect > > speed-up to be equal to ratio of clock speeds. (Also, as Prof. > > Ripley > > pointed out, a P4 does less than a PIII at the same clock speed, and > > the > > number AMD attach to Athlon is not clock speed.) > > > > We do have a dual P4 Xeon 2.4 GHz with 8GB RAM, and jobs > run more than > > twice as fast as my PIII 933MHz laptop. > > > > Andy > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > > From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] > > > Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 4:55 PM > > > To: Jason Liao > > > Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch > > > Subject: Re: [R] Dismal R performance of Athlon moble CPU? > > > > > > > > > On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Jason Liao wrote: > > > > > > > I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 > > > Ghz. I heard > > > > that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So > > > I bought a > > > > Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon > > > 2200+ will > > > > be twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation > > program > > > > and the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly > > > slower than > > > > a Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. > > > What is your > > > > experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the > > > future? Thanks. > > > > > > So I expect you think a P4M 1.4GHz (on which I am writing > > > this) should be a lot faster than a PIII 1GHz? It is often > > > slower. Don't compare laptop chips with desktop ones, nor > > > different chip families (an Athlon 2200 is not 2.2GHz, BTW). > > > PIIIs seem the fastest per GHz, but they don't do many GHz. > > > > > > I am rather pleased with my dual Athlon 2600, but then P4's > > > don't allow > > > multiprocessors and the machine with dual Athlons was cheaper than > > a > > > comparable one with a single 2.4GHz P4. > > > > > > You have tuned an ATLAS implementation to your CPU, I take > > > it? If not, > > > that's the first step to optimal R performance. > > > > > > -- > > > Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk > > > 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 > > > > > > ______________________________________________ > > > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > > > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo> /r-help > > > > > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ---------------- > > Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments, contains > > information of Merck & Co., Inc. (Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, > > USA) that may be confidential, proprietary copyrighted > and/or legally > > > > privileged, and is intended solely for the use of the individual or > > entity named on this message. If you are not the intended > recipient, > > and have received this message in error, please immediately return > > this by > > e-mail and then delete it. > > > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ---------------- > > > ====> Jason G. Liao, Ph.D. > Division of Biometrics > University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey > 335 George Street, Suite 2200 > New Brunswick, NJ 08903-2688 > phone (732) 235-8611, fax (732) 235-9777 > http://www.geocities.com/jg_liao >------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments, ...{{dropped}}
I haven't gotten around to assembling the toolset required to build R on Windows, since most of what I do is smallish interactive problems. However, another possibility would be to load CygWin/XFree86 on your laptop (which I've done), then download Atlas 3.5.7 from SourceForge (which I've done), then build Atlas with CygWin(which I've done) and then build a second version of R under CygWin using Atlas, and use the CygWin/Atlas R for the heavy number-crunching jobs. This last I haven't done, so I can't say whether there are any gotchas, but everything else I've done with CygWin/XFree86 has worked. My laptop is a Compaq Presario with a 1.67 GHz Athlon XP. Atlas screams on it; the Atlas folks were grinning when I sent them the log. Atlas has an assembly language kernel for Athlons (and P4s as well IIRC). Oh, yeah ... If you do try my scheme, make sure you don't have spaces in the paths ... Atlas still isn't immune to that sort of thing under CygWin. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky mailto:znmeb at borasky-research.net http://www.borasky-research.net "Suppose that tonight, while you sleep, a miracle happens - you wake up tomorrow with what you have longed for! How will you discover that a miracle happened? How will your loved ones? What will be different? What will you notice? What do you need to explode into tomorrow with grace, power, love, passion and confidence?" -- L. Michael Hall, PhD> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch > [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Jason Liao > Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 1:44 PM > To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch > Subject: [R] Dismal R performance of Athlon moble CPU? > > > I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 Ghz. > I heard that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point > capacity. So I bought a Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I > expected that new Athlon 2200+ will be twice as fast as the P > III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program and the new > computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly slower than a > Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. What > is your experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in > the future? Thanks. > > By the way, the OS is Windows XP home edtion. > > Jason > > ====> Jason G. Liao, Ph.D. > Division of Biometrics > University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey > 335 George Street, Suite 2200 > New Brunswick, NJ 08903-2688 > phone (732) 235-8611, fax (732) 235-9777 > http://www.geocities.com/jg_liao > > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo> /r-help >