You'd expect a factor of 4/3 from cores, 4/3 from vector FLOPs available, and about 3/2 from GHz (if the cores can all turbo to max.) so worst case of about 3 from HW, but there seems to be an addition 2 to 4x of software problem. These seem to be linear algebra of some sort, and while we know that on Intel these automatically use all cores and full vectors, it's quite likely that the code to do that has not been completely ported yet. Then there some things were 5 to 10x worse.

$mathematica for ipad$

Some of these were the generation of random numbers, and sorting. Some were pretty much equivalent in performance to Intel (slightly slower, but rather better than the GHz ratio).

I ran through one after another of the benchmarks in the Mathematica Benchmark suite, which is not ideal (very much numerics biased, not much testing of symbolics) and found results tended to be of three types. This was comparing an A10X at 2.35GHz and with 4GiB of RAM (this may be significant if the OS had to engage in a lot of page compression/decompression) against a Mac Pro with quadcore i7 at, I think, 3.6GHz or so and 16GiB. This is turn means that it's difficult to create a reasonable pool of items to test all at once, you have to step your way trying each thing at a time and feeling out how large a problem can grow before it dies.Įven so, one can learn some interesting things in just a few hours, with results that can be interpreted as meaning pretty much anything you might like. It's a substantial hassle to do serious benchmarking comparisons between the devices because the Player is firstly not an editable environment (you have to wrap everything you want to be timed inside some sort of Manipulate, and every change requires a cycle of save on the Mac, delete on the iPad, reload on the iPad), secondly Wolfram have made the decision (for whatever reason? or it's a bug? or it's an iOS power-saving thing?) that any calculation that takes longer than around 5 seconds goes into some sort of neverland where the UI doesn't tell you what's happened, but the calculation is never going to complete. Well the Player has been released and I've spent a few hours playing with it. I mentioned some weeks ago that Wolfram was going to ship a Mathematica Player for iPad, and that it would be an interesting performance comparison against x86 of a 'serious' app.

Mathematica for ipad