Anyone had any experience running fairly intensive analysis on a new
MacPro?  I am looking to upgrade my desktop, and 80% of my time is spent in
RStudio/Latex/Sweave... working primarily with microbiome analysis (large
datasets).  Been considering a new MacPro, but I am a little hesitant
about; a) moving my desktop to Mac, and b) whether the MacPro performance
will be worth the cost (it almost seems geared more towards graphics than
anything else).

For some background - I have worked on Macs for years, but moved my main
work desktop to Windows about 2 years ago.  I also do quite a bit of work
in QIIME - which can be done on the mac (not the PC) and is both RAM and
CPU intensive... so, I can benefit from multiple cores, large RAM, etc.  My
2011 MacBook Pro seems extremely sluggish at this point when running basic
tasks (probably need to do a fresh OS install), but the Windows machine has
never slowed down.  This has added to some of my hesitation.

Anyone have opinions/experience using R on the new MacPro?


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek@r-project.org>wrote:

>
> On Mar 10, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Nick <franken_beans2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Good afternoon, I am looking at buying my first Mac and thought i'd ask
> for advice for what I should get. I have it down to the two models below
> (but am open to realistic suggestions).
> >
> > I will primarily be using R for machine learning packages, and the data
> sets are very large. If any other specs are needed let me know.
> >
>
> "data sets are very large' - well, the machines listed below are certainly
> not suitable to run anything on large data ;) so you may want to quantify
> what you mean here. You want as much RAM as possible for large data since
> that is the single item that will cause huge drop-off in performance when
> exhausted and R certainly can take quite a bit of memory if this is really
> your only machine to run computing on. Note that in modern Apple laptops
> you cannot add more memory later, so this is rather important factor.
>
> Given a choice of the two MacBook Air is not a computing machine - it's
> optimized for power consumption, not speed, so the only reason to go for it
> is if you're looking for a light notebook and don't care about the
> computing speed as much.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > 13-inch MacBook Air ($1,349)
> > 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
> > 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
> > 128GB Flash Storage
> >
> > 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina ($1,399.00)
> > 2.4GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 2.9GHz
> > 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
> > 128GB PCIe-based Flash Storage
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac@r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac@r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

