> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I did not use R ten years ago, but "reasonable" RAM amounts have >> multiplied by roughly a factor of 10 (from 128Mb to 1Gb), CPU speeds >> have gone up by a factor of 30 (from 90Mhz to 3Ghz), and disk space >> availabilty has gone up probably by a factor of 10. So, unless the I/O >> performance scales nonlinearly with size (a bit strange but not >> inconsistent with my R experiments), I would think that things should >> have gotten faster (by the wall clock, not slower). Of course, it is >> possible that the other components of the R system have been worked on >> more -- I am not equipped to comment... > > I think your RAM calculation is a bit off. in late 1993, 4MB systems > were the standard PC, with 16 or 32 MB on high-end workstations.
I beg to differ. In 1989, Mac II came standard with 8MB, NeXT came standard with 16MB. By 1994, 16MB was pretty much standard on good quality (= Pentium, of which the 90Mhz was the first example) PCs, with 32Mb pretty common (though I suspect that most R/S-Plus users were on SUNs, which were somewhat more plushly equipped). > Comparable figures today are probably 256MB for the entry-level PC and > a couple GB in the high end. So that's more like a factor of 64. On the > other hand, CPU's have changed by more than the clock speed; in > particular, the number of clock cycles per FP calculation has > decreased considerably and is currently less than one in some > circumstances. > I think that FP performance has increased more than integer performance, which has pretty much kept pace with the clock speed. The compilers have also improved a bit... Igor ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html