I am not an expert in computers, but here are my thoughts:
1. the 900m limit mentioned by Tiago does not apply to 64-bit systems
2. the astronomical number mentioned by James also does not apply, see
my earlier post re Windows limits.
The amount of memory usable by Stata is the min of:
1) mem that CPU can use
2) mem that OS can use
3) mem that Stata can use
(1^) is the astronomical value that was mentioned by James.
(2^) is the OS limit that I've mentioned earlier (can be as low as 8GB
(eight GB)on some Vista 64 releases.
(3^) is something unclear. It is probably close to (2), but as we know
from Win-32 world not always the same (here compare the 940m value
mentioned by Tiago, with 4GB that a 32-bit CPU can address - quite an
essential difference).
Features:
there is probably no difference between features of Stata running in
XP and Vista - there is only one executable after all (for these two
systems). If there was some sort of incompatibility, we would probably
know this from Stata, Corp. The difference may come from the
implementation of the OS functions that Stata calls.
Performance:
This site reports some aggregated comparisons:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xp-vs-vista,1531-9.html
the difference is within plus-minus 5%. For particular applications
the difference varies from -89% to +21% or so.
Support:
As for the support of Windows, I think that if you use a PC
exclusively for running Stata and you don't find a problem within the
support time left (6 years as I understood from the earlier posts)
than you can run it as long as Stata Corp releases version of Stata
running on Windows XP (who knows, may be Stata 11 will _require_
Vista???)
Price:
it really depends on the budget. But one can build a really cool
server with all the bells and whistles for the price of Stata/MP 10
(2CPU). Don't know about Brazil, but in the US many manufacturers ship
their computers with OS included.And it does not add much to the price
of OSless PC.
Quote:
> I wouldn�t do any investiment in an OS knowing beforehand that I will need
> to change everything within 8 years, and pay again
In 8 years any top of the top computer you can get now will seem like
a handheld calculator. Many components are expected to fail earlier
than that (see some interesting results from Google Labs:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf)
Conclusion:
I think it is better to come up with a benchmark.do file which will
run something computationally intensive and let the statalist members
run it on their machines and report with a configuration of their
machines for comparison. Anyone is willing to take the initiative?
Regards,
Sergiy
On 8/6/08, Tiago V. Pereira <[email protected]> wrote:
> James wrote:
>
> Personally, I'm a Unix person, when the choice is available, though it
> usually isn't except for my home system.
>
> --------------
>
> So, based on your conjecture and if you want to use Stata 64-bit MP/SE
> with a nice performance, I believe that you already know the answer: use
> linux with a 64-bit version. Try to convince the guys to save their money
> regarding the OS if you haven't already bought Stata 64-bit.
>
> Nevertheless, if you already have Stata 64-bit for Windows, Vista still
> seems better than XP 64-bit. However, if one can load 3GB under XP 64-bit,
> the difference is small, making the price as well as the support the only
> issues to think about.
>
> Assuming that they will be supporting XP until 2014(I don�t believe that),
> you are going to have ~6 years. Since you are likely to be from
> USA/Europe, this seems to be a fairly nice time. Here, in Brazil, I
> wouldn�t do any investiment in an OS knowing beforehand that I will need
> to change everything within 8 years, and pay again.
>
>
> Cheers!
>
> Tiago
>
>
>
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
