[R] Best Mac for R

[peter dalgaard]

> On 26 Feb 2015, at 06:26 , Dan Murphy <chiefmurphy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Quick responses as usual. Can always count on R-Help! Bert's point
> that "it depends" is key, of course. Mark and Karim reminded me that R
> does not use all cores natively. Putting those together, an expensive
> quad core machine is not necessary for simple package development,
> documentation, etc. And for hard core (no pun intended) analysis, a
> multi-core machine won't be fully utilized without parallel
> implementation of some type. Thanks all for your advice. Just what I
> was looking for.
> Dan
> 

Notice though, that parallel features _can_ be exploited fairly easily on the multi-CPU Macs (it depends somewhat on whether you need fine-grained parallelism as in fast matrix operations or just "embarrassingly parallel" tasks like simulation studies - the former needs R to be linked against the Accelerate framework).

Also notice that the real Mac experts live on the R-SIG-Mac list and not so much on R-help.

-pd


> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Karim Mezhoud <kmezhoud at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> It is not so efficient to have the most speed processor or biggest RAM. In
>> general One processor is working at the time.
>> It is more interesting to work with Linux for multiple multi_thread package
>> and 64 bit.
>> I am not sure if turbo boost is working with R.
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1395309/how-to-make-r-use-all-processors
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:12 PM, Mark Sharp <msharp at txbiomed.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> For what I do, which does not require a lot of parallel work, the high end
>>> iMac was faster and much less expensive than the Mac Pro.
>>> 
>>> Mark
>>> R. Mark Sharp, Ph.D.
>>> msharp at TxBiomed.org
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Feb 25, 2015, at 1:50 PM, Dan Murphy <chiefmurphy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I am possibly in the market for a new laptop. Predominantly a Windows
>>>> user, I owned a macbook pro 10 years ago and am considering going that
>>>> route again. Does the standard advice still hold: Get the most
>>>> powerful processor (i7), most ram (16GB), and largest internal storage
>>>> (512GB), if affordable?
>>>> thanks,
>>>> dan
>>>> 
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>> 
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com