Matlab and OS X
By Giovanni at Thu, Sep 4 2008 5:25pm |
I have seen a couple of threads on Matlab on OS X on this forum and I want to re-propose the issue. In particular one of the threads (about 2 years ago) stated that Matlab on OS X is not "native" and therefore it runs slower than it would run on Linux or Windows. Does anyone have information on the status of things now? I am wondering whether I should still prefer the Linux version.
Giovanni
In my experience, matlab
In my experience, matlab just dogs on Macs. We have an 8-core MacPro with 8GB RAM, and it runs much of matlab slower than windows or linux computers with far less impressive specs. A lot of this seems to do with the X11 version on Macs; there is another version you can download and install (don't have the name/link handy...), but it doesn't help much. Our MacPro quad-boots Leopard, XP, Vista, and Linux (Ubuntu), and the matlab bench command shows that Leopard results are by far the slowest, running Matlab 2008a. If you just need it for backend calculations that do not require much graphical presentation, then it would probably be fine, but as soon as you start doing figures or GUIs, then the situation deteriorates pretty quickly.
Of course this is just my experience, and others may tell you otherwise. I am probably bitter since the SOLE purpose of getting the MacPro for our lab was to run matlab, and a $300 single core dell desktop running vista ends up being faster. But, the general consensus seems to be that the mac version of matlab is lacking. Your mileage may vary :-).
Now that I tried it, I must
Now that I tried it, I must say I agree. The Matlab "bench" program runs around twice slower on OS X than on Windows installed in a partition of the same computer with Boot Camp.