O/K, guys. I have been investigating this for a long time. I got started because a CPA friend of mine had some Excel spreadsheets which were huge. When he input new numbers and hit enter, he could walk away, brew a pot of coffee and, if he was lucky, when he came back the computations might be done. What I found was that CPU speed is not an issue. It is "memory". The more of it you have , the fasted the calculations because underneath the Excel engine are floating point math formulas that really speed up the process. With low memory the FP part of any CPU does not have enough to work with.
14 replies to this topic
#14
Waco
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Posted 05 December 2012 - 07:20 PM
The amount of memory available has very little to do with FP calculation speeds.O/K, guys. I have been investigating this for a long time. I got started because a CPA friend of mine had some Excel spreadsheets which were huge. When he input new numbers and hit enter, he could walk away, brew a pot of coffee and, if he was lucky, when he came back the computations might be done. What I found was that CPU speed is not an issue. It is "memory". The more of it you have , the fasted the calculations because underneath the Excel engine are floating point math formulas that really speed up the process. With low memory the FP part of any CPU does not have enough to work with.
What version of Excel was this? The newest ones can utilize a huge number of threads as long as your workload isn't sequential in nature. If it is...you're pretty much stuck throwing the fastest cores you can get at it.
Booyah.
#15
Hyper
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Posted 06 December 2012 - 06:40 AM
I have a 3930k w/32g ram but I havent done anything with excel in a while. I could look for a benchmark prog this weekend and see what it does though.
