June 18, 2005
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A few weeks ago I bought a PowerMac with dual 2.0 processors. I
had looked through the reviews and was excited about working with
it. Along the way I had seen a review that suggested it would run
about 25% faster than a dual 3.2 Xeon from Dell, so I thought that
would be pretty cool.I was running a particularly long analysis recently and had the chance
to compare the PowerMac to the Dell, and was surprised to find that it
ran about as fast as you would expect a 2.0 G machine to run - in other
words, quite a bit slower.I've thought a little about what could be going on. The same
program was running on both machines (R - for those who are familiar
with stat software). But I was running a version on the PowerMac
that I had downloaded, rather than building from scratch. My
suspicion is that the PowerMac software was compiled on a 32bit machine
and, hence, it fails to take full advantage of the 64bit architecture.Why don't I build it from scratch myself? Learning curve and
limited time at the moment. I hope to do that in the "not so
distant" future, but time will tell.Which doesn't change the fact that I enjoy using the mac. Change is good.
Anyone with PowerMac experience with R is invited to comment on whether
my suspicions are true - especially if they have compiled R from
scratch for OSX Tiger.
Comments (2)
Dear Dad, I would venture to guess that you are perhaps the only PowerMac R user on all of Xanga. But I would love to be proved wrong
Hey Power macs arn't the future dell is the way to go
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