dear readers---following dirk's advice on r-help, let me ask if someone  
else has recently done research on what the top performing R platform for  
the money is. My needs are for monte-carlo simulations (which therefore are  
easily parallelizable to multiple cores; I don't think R can use "core i7"  
threads), mostly linear algebra. I thought I would share what little  
knowledge I gathered today (and collect any ideas/suggestions that I may  
have overlooked).

the prime candidates would seem to be a dual Shanghai 2.3GHz system  
($175/processor) + $100/motherboard + DDR2 Reg RAM; or a single core i7 920  
2.66GHz ($280/processor) + $300/motherboard + DDR3 RAM. These two seem to  
be heads and shoulders above their siblings in $/performance. The Intel rig  
is about 20% more expensive...but being faster in linear non-parallel tasks  
is nice, too.

In some benchmarks, Whetstone (on Tom's hardware) in particular, the core  
i7 is almost twice as fast. More importantly, I found web benchmarks of 160  
specfloat for a pair of 2.8GHz Core i7 Xeons vs. 105 for a dual Shanghai  
2.7. Extrapolating, this would mean that the dual Shanghai 2.3GHz system  
does around 90, while the single core i7 920 does about 80 (including a  
slight bonus for single-processor use). It also presumes, as I believe,  
that specfloat is a good indication of how fast linear algebra will perform  
on R (and Stata). my big unknown here is whether specfloat can use  
multi-threading while R and Stata cannot or vice-versa. Does anybody know?

So, AMD= $5/Specfloat. Intel= $6.75/Specfloat. This is only  
CPU/motherboard. Other components will cost similarly, and thus bring the  
relative ratio of the two closer to one another.

I hope this helps. of course, in about a month, it will be different  
again...

/iaw

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