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Would a better graphics card or more cores make Mathematica faster?

Asked 2011-12-26T20:26:12.570
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In general, can Mathematica automatically (i.e. without writing code specifically for this) exploit GPU hardware and/or parallelize built-in operations across multiple cores?

For example, for drawing a single very CPU-intensive plot or solving a very CPU-intensive equation, would upgrading the graphics hardware result in speed-up? Would upgrading to a CPU with more cores speed things up? (I realize that more cores mean I could solve more equations in parallel but I'm curious about the single-equation case)

Just trying to get a handle on how Mathematica exploits hardware.

performance wolfram-mathematica hardware
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I can't comment much on how Mathematica uses the GPU (as I never had the chance to try), but I don't believe it does it by default (i.e without you writing code specifically to exploit the GPU)

Adding more cores will help if you explicitly parallelize your calculations (see Parallelize and related functions).

If you don't parallelize explicitly, I believe there are still certain numerical calculations that take advantage of multiple cores. I'm not sure which one, but I do know that some linear algebra related functions (LinearSolve, Det, etc.) use multiple cores by default.

answered 2011-12-26T21:44:50.427

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