[R] 8 fast or 4 very fast cores?

[Ben Bolker]

Leif Ruckman <Leif <at> Ruckman.se> writes:

> 
> I am going to buy a new computer ( Dell workstation T5810 - Windows 8) 
> to work with simulatons in R.
> 
> Now I am asked what kind of processor I like and I was given two choices.
> 
> 1. Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 - 4 cores 3.7 GHz Turbo
> 2. Intel Xeon E5-2640 v3 - 8 cores 2.6 GHz Turbo
> 
> I don't know what is better in simulations studies in R, a few very fast 
> cores or many cores at normal speed.


  It's **very** hard to answer such general questions reliably, but I'll
take a guess and say that if you're doing simulation studies you're likely
to be doing tasks that are easily distributable (e.g. many random
realizations of the same simulation and/or realizations for many
different sets of parameter values) and so the more-cores option
will be a good idea.

  But it's possible that what you mean by "simulation studies" is
different.

  If you can do some benchmarking of your problems on an existing
machine that would probably be a good idea.

  Ben Bolker