Hi, I'm really confused about which cpu should i go for whether AMD a10 8700p or intel i5 5200u with a ram of 8gb.

I use Simulink for my masters thesis so...

Answer 1

[Rini Ann Jerin A]

i3 or i5 processor are best suited for working with Matlab. RAM with 8GB is not bad. You should have a good speed with these specifications. All the best!

[murali vnv]

Thanks for the suggestion, gonna go with i3 5010u cause i'm on budget right now.

[Walter Roberson]

If you are using graphics much then you have complications. Intel i3 CPUs tend to have built in graphics chips for low cost overall systems, and those graphics chips might not happen to be good for the kind of graphics you want to use.

Systems with i3 CPUs also tend not to have GPU cards, which might not matter for what you are doing, but for some projects might turn out to be important.

Systems with i3 CPUs tend to be fairly restrictive on the maximum amount of RAM you can put in them, and that can lead to significant problems in time. 8 Gb is not a trivial amount of RAM so it might be enough for you for now though.

Another question to consider is whether the system will have the external interfaces you need, and enough of them. The external interfaces on my system are nearly full: I have something plugged into the ethernet, a drive in Firewire, another drive in USB 3.0, and I need a USB hub to plug in my UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) controller and my wireless mouse dongle (not a bluetooth mouse, the batteries on those don't last long enough for my tastes.) The only external interface I do not have anything plugged in to is my Lightning connector (and I would need that if my phone or my music system were newer models.)

[murali vnv]

Thanks for your suggestion, found the i7 one with lesser price on best buy

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-15-6-laptop-intel-core-i7-6gb-memory-1tb-hard-drive-black-gloss/4540000.p?id=1219764047599&skuId=4540000

[Walter Roberson]

http://laptoping.com/specs/product/dell-inspiron-i5558-2571blk/ seems like a balanced review.

Key limitations I note:

• dual core i7, when more cores are being common
• only 6 Gb of RAM built in, but can be expanded to 16 Gb
• hard drive is 5400 rpm, which is disappointing for an internal laptop drive these days
• no GPU
• 2 x USB 2.0 + 1 x USB 3.0 -- that could lead to competition for the single USB 3.0 later
• The Intel HD5000 graphics is iffy for some purposes. For example when I was investigating something about the Psychometric Toolbox (a third party free toolbox for psychological experiments) the other day, I found statements from the developer that the Intel HD graphics were broken at the firmware level for the purposes of precision drawing and so are just not supported by that toolbox.

If you looked at this laptop on the basis of my remarks about the graphics that tends to be built in to i3 chips, or about GPU seldom being there for i3 systems, then this system is not the answer.

It is difficult to give complete answers about what to buy on a budget without knowing more about the mathematics of the computations you will be doing, and about the graphics you need. There are definitely some cases where you would be better off buying an 8 core machine where each core is slower or lower range (e.g., i5 instead of i7) compared to a 2 core machine at the higher range, if your processing happens to split nicely into parallel computations. But if your calculations are (for mathematics or coding difficulty reasons) effectively confined to 1 core, then you probably don't need more than 2 cores and you would want one of the cores to be as fast as you could afford (and the second could keep running the operating system and other active programs.)

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

I like the AMD option, and have three AMD laptops of various ages (one recent). AMD processors automatically use the GPU cores as extra computing cores when necessary. Since you’re considering an A10, see the AMD A-Series Desktop APUs page. Search the site for more information. (AMD APUs are preferred by gamers, explaining my preference for them.) The more RAM the better.

[Federico Manfrin]

I think APU are not the best solution because 2 physical core share the FPU, and Matlab speed increase with the number of FPU in the processor.

[Star Strider]

This thread and my Answer are four years old. Much has occurred in that time. I have two computers that I use with MATLAB, both with Ryzen processors.

[Federico Manfrin]

Yep, but Ryzen are not APUs.

Ryzen performance can be evaluated thought the benchmark, here you are (attached) a screenshot of the performance chart, comparing a Ryzen7 with other processor

Answer 3

[Federico Manfrin]

Matlab compiler use the processor's FPU to speed up the script execution.

Best processor for Matlab have much core, each one with his own FPU

Worst processor for Matlab have less core, shared FPU ecc..

Matlab doesn't gain any a performance improvement with the virtual core (like intel hyperthreading tecnology).

If you want to know more .. follow this link:

https://it.mathworks.com/support/requirements/choosing-a-computer.html