MATLAB on MacBook Pro
11 April 2006
I did some simple testing of MATLAB on my MacBook Pro today. I compared MATLAB running (emulated) in OS X to MATLAB running in XP via Apple's Boot Camp and also in XP using a Parallels virtual machine. The results are somewhat surprising in that I was expecting MATLAB in Boot Camp to be fastest overall, but that isn't always the case.
The times listed below are from running bench(10) and averaging the results. I actually executed bench(10) twice for each test, once to warm the machine up and a second time for the actual test. For those unfamiliar with bench, here is what it tests (taken from the MATLAB documentation):
| Test | Description | Performance Factors |
|---|---|---|
| LU | LAPACK, n = 1000 | Floating point, regular memory access |
| FFT | Fast Fourier Transform | Floating point, irregular memory access |
| ODE | Ordinary diff. eqn. | Data structures and M-files |
| Sparse | Solve sparse system | Mixed integer and floating point |
| 2-D | plot(fft(eye)) | 2-D line drawing graphics |
| 3-D | MathWorks logo | 3-D animated OpenGL graphics |
OS X
1.8960 0.5202 0.6114 1.7013 2.6938 2.2483
XP - Boot Camp
0.7849 0.3880 0.2011 0.5356 0.9143 0.7517
XP - Parallels virtual machine
0.4563 0.7197 0.1571 0.6858 0.5903 0.7942
I’m surprised by the Parallels virtual machine beating out a native XP installation in a few of the cases, especially in the graphics tests. OS X beat Parallels in the FFT test, but was a factor of 2 or 3 slower in the other tests. Let’s hope a universal build of MATLAB is not too far in the future.