Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on October 20, 2017 1:34 am wrote:
> I mentioned some weeks ago that Wolfram was going to ship a Mathematica Player for iPad,
> and that it would be an interesting performance comparison against x86 of a "serious"
> app. Well the Player has been released and I've spent a few hours playing with it.
>

Sorry, not clipping the rest for any other reason that readability, all quite interesting.

However, I just wonder.
What makes you think that you will ever measure anything other than 'how much does Wolfram feel like spending on different platforms'? I think your early measurements bear this out strongly.

These systems are so high level that there is no 'porting over' between systems, as almost certainly they use 3rd party libraries for matrix work, etc and the quality, and even of those will vary hugely.

so you end up with one of two situations.
Either Wolfram does, rather surprisingly, ignore existing high performance numerical libraries and roll their own, in which case huge and long effort will be required to maximise performance on each platform (and each cpu generation..), so you are just measuring their commitment to those platforms in the form of developer investment.
Or Wolfram use the existing libraries, and you are measuring the relative quality of whichever they choose, and how well it maps to the requirements of Mathematica.

this seems to me to fall into the same trap as the inclusion of encryption runs using acceleration (if present) in certain 'benchmarks', only even more so. It measures little of actual use.

If your intention is to measure some form of relative cpu performance for anything other than Mathematica, I wonder what other applications you feel it would map to?

Wouldnt it be much more sensible to test more controllable kernels if you were actually looking for some form of numerical benchmarking? However good luck with even that, it is more slippery than an eel, as every single application tends to have very different requirements.

I suspect the most interesting part of this would be some insight as to what features Wolfram actually gets around to using..