Walking Randomly

If you are interested in gadgets then you will almost certainly have heard of the Asus EEE ultra portable (and ultra cheap) range of laptops. I have yet to get my grubby hands on one but I know one or two people who have already taken the plunge and one of them wanted to install Mathematica on his Asus EEE 900.

“No problem” said I “but would you mind running the Mathematica benchamark on it for me when you’re done”

He duly did so and the results are in. For reference, he un-installed the version of Linux that comes with the EEE and put Fedora Core 9 on it instead before installing Mathematica 6.0.0. The specs of the machine are

• 900Mhz Intel Celeron M
• 1GB RAM
• 20GB Solid State Drive

To run the Mathematica Benchmark you use the following commands

Needs[“Benchmarking`”]
BenchmarkReport[]

The overall result for the Asus EEE 900 was 0.43

To give you an idea of what this might mean – here are some other results (Higher is better)

• quad-core 3.0GHz Intel Xeon (Linux 64bit) 3.67
• 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 (windows) – 1.00
• AMD 2400XP (32bit Linux) – 0.67

The full list of timings (in seconds) for the Asus EEE were (lower is better)

• Total – 200.9 (a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 gives a total of 100)
• Test 1 – 5.15
• Test 2 – 2.41
• Test 3 – 3.10
• Test 4 – 15.90
• Test 5 – 18.20
• Test 6 – 1.81
• Test 7- 3.33
• Test 8 – 10.30
• Test 9 – 50.00
• Test 10 – 5.06
• Test 11 – 8.44
• Test 12 – 7.35
• Test 13 – 7.38
• Test 14 – 27.20
• Test 15 – 35.30

I’m not going to explain what each of these tests actually does because this is a post for current Mathematica users who are curious about Asus’ machines rather than a post about the benchmark itself.

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