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From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: What to buy??(numbercruncher)
Message-ID: <nd8H?xjy@cs.psu.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 19:10:41 GMT
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	<1991Jun17.142339.21049@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <fv5H7bfy@cs.psu.edu>
	<1991Jun17.172930.13518@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
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In-Reply-To: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu's message of 17 Jun 91 17: 29:30 GMT
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In article <1991Jun17.172930.13518@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:

   >Memory is cheap, but Mathematica can use more than 9MB of RAM.  Get a
   >computer with virtual memory.
   >
   >-Mike

	   And wait for it to page in and out? When memory is
   $60/meg? What's the point? So get 18MB if you need that much. The
   time it saves you (if you need it) makes it more than worth the
   cost.

The problem is you don't know how much you will need.  People run some
pretty large Mathematica jobs.  I'm willing to bet there are times
when 32MB of RAM is not enough.  Besides, if a job is running for
hours you don't want to find out half way through that it ran out of
memory.  Let it page to disk.  If you are using the machine for
something else the CPU will be given to another task while the system
is paging.  Then there is the case where you actually want to use your
system when Mathematica is running.  Fire up that word processor and C
compiler(well, I wouldn't do that w/o a little memory protection).

BTW, RAM is down to $40/meg, and the price of 4MB SIMMS is rumored to
be ready to drop again.

-Mike