Recommended processor for 2-core Stata/MP

[Weston Ley]

Hello,

I currently have a job that requires me to clean and analyze datasets that are up to 16GB large. My current computer is not up to this task, and I am buying a laptop that I can hopefully use for the next three to four years. I plan to buy a laptop with 32GB of RAM and a SSD with fast read/write speeds. Given I have a 2-core license of Stata/MP, I much will I benefit form a Core i9 processor over a Core i7? How much is the performance improvement of Core i9 processors over Core i7 processors due to more cores?

In a second but related question, are there any CPU benchmarks that serve as a good proxy for performance in 2-core Stata/MP?

[Clyde Schechter]

I don't know enough about processor hardware to answer any of the questions you have posed. Others do, and I'm confident, will respond.

But I do want to point out that if you are working with 16GB data sets, having 32GB of RAM is not really enough, and the available RAM heavily influences performance. Unless you are doing a lot of computationally intensive work, RAM may influence performance more than processor. Your data set will share memory with the operating system, Stata itself, and any other programs and applications running concurrently. You really will not have much room to spare in RAM if you need to open multiple data sets or carry out memory-intensive operations like -merge-, -joinby-, or -reshape-. For data sets this large the smallest RAM I would be comfortable with is 64GB, and even that I would consider merely adequate.