11 inch MacBook Air and MATLAB

I got my new 11 inch MacBook Air in the mail yesterday. One of the first things I did was to install one of my most used, applications MATLAB (r2009a). I figured I’d run bench, MATLAB’s built-in series of benchmark. I’ve never actually used bench before, but perhaps there’s another MATLAB user out there who is thinking of getting this new little computer. I don’t have much to say about it, since I’m not a MATLAB power-user, but it works for me. Here’s my results:

11 inch MacBook Air & MATLAB benchmark, raw numbers

11 inch MacBook Air & MATLAB benchmark, relative speed

And here’s my setup:

Update on Monday, December 6, 2010 at 8:02 by Jay Kickliter

I think I fixed the image problems. Also, I should I give my opinion. If you see the results, it may not look that great. But I’ve been using MATLAB on the Air, and find it totally usable. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, but as long as you aren’t doing massive number crunching, it’s fine.

Comments

[Nate]

Something is wrong with your post. I don't see any results.

[Jay Kickliter]

Thanks. I'll take a look at it when I get home.

[Jay Kickliter]

Nate, I'm seing the images. I don't know what's causing the error for you. What browser are you using?

[Joyce]

Quick question.... I'm considering buying a macbook air to serve as an addition to my desktop... - do you also run stata on it? if so, how does it do? I need both matlab and stata on a mostly daily basis... :(

thanks!

[Nikhil]

Hi, I just saw your benchmark. Thanks for doing it! In my experience with benchmarking with bench() though, I've found that running it just once doesn't give the true performance of the machine, as the overhead of loading the benchmark also contributes in those cases. You can get around this by using bench(n) where n is a number of times you want to run the benchmark. I usually do something like bench(5). It will automatically put all of the runs on the same graph if n <= 5. Cheers!

[andy]

hello i want to buy a macbook air 13 "with 2Gb and 128Gb disk,

I think install matlab and paralles that such work this computer?
I appreciate any recommendations, thanks in advance

Andy

[Jay Kickliter]

I'd recommend getting 4 gb of ram since it's hardwired to the board. Also, you could use Parallels, but it's not necessary since there's a "native" Mac version of Matlab.

[ANDY]

thanks for you answer, i think i'll buy a macbookpro 4Gb :(

[Jay Kickliter]

You can get the air with 4 GB.