On the other side of the distribution, a few commands do not run faster, often because they are inherently sequential, such as time-series commands. These values are median speed improvements. Across all commands, Stata/MP runs 1.6 times faster on two cores, 2.1 times faster on four cores, and 2.7 times faster on eight cores. In a perfect world, software would run twice as fast on two cores, four times as fast on four cores, eight times as fast on eight cores, and so on. I'm stuck on my own research and saw your topic with questions I've asked myself a long time ago. I'm trying to be respectful of my funding source - acknowledging that my laptop is only 15 months old and I'm in an institution where frugality is important! - but do need to be able to make progress in my work. Thanks in advance for any advice that can shed light on this dilemma. (All of this assumes I will upgrade to Stata/MP for the appropriate number of cores.) Is it worth paying $3000 for a 4GHz quad-core, or is that likely to provide only a "clinically insignificant" improvement in speed (i.e., let's say 20% faster would be clinically insignificant, for my purposes) compared with a 2.6GHz quad-core for half the price (16GB RAM for both)?.Would going up to a 6GHz dual-core (I don't think that exists, but for the sake of argument) double my processing speed?.Will going up to 4 cores effectively double my processing speed? 6 cores, triple?.I'm currently running Stata/MP 13.1 on a 2.9GHz dual-core i7 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and I know (.think I know) it isn't a RAM issue since all my datasets are about 1GB only. I have funding to buy a new computer (a desktop). But I've started doing a lot of mixed-effects models with meqrlogit and golly they take forever to run - I've had runs take a week, during which I can't do any other Stata commands. Compared to most on this forum, I have only a rudimentary understanding of What Makes Computers Go.
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