Q: I am about to spec out a new computer for msmac3D. Will I notice a difference with a more powerful machine? I don’t like waiting but if it is 3 seconds for a run or 6 seconds for a run no sense spending $1000 more for it. Your thoughts?
A: It is amazing that today a $1000 machine is so fast and capable. A year ago we upgraded to a
Lenovo Y50 notebook for $1000 and it was exponentially faster than my prior computer, for all tasks. (think we got one off the shelf at a local Tiger direct outlet)
With computers we get used to something I call the cadence of response:
- We get used to a certain time lag to doing things and then you upgrade your computer everything happens so much faster you develop a faster cadence.
Six months or so ago I
changed my hard drive on the Y50 to an SSD drive which improved on the 3X real time response of the msmac3D benchmarks.
I had heard it made startup and shutdown almost instantaneous (no more disk I/O time, it was all memory!)
And it did!
So shutting down/starting up/anything than had to do disk I/O was 30% or more faster.
Point of all this is that no matter what you change to the speed change will be a pleasant surprise.
So look around since there are a lot of great deals out there and you will be pleasantly surprised at the advance of technology!
Below are two graphs of the performance measures of computers, AMAZING!
- flops.png (132.11 KiB) Viewed 5786 times