What are the most important components to have in a laptop for digital humanists who do text mining/topic modeling/big data crunching? Quad core processors vs. dual core? More RAM (16GB vs. 8GB)? More processor speed (3+GHz vs. 2.x)?
DH laptop horsepower
(6 posts) (5 voices)-
Replying to @fritzvandover's post:
Almost all DH applications--and particularly the ones you mention--are I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound. Given a choice, I'd prioritize an SSD drive, followed by more RAM, followed by CPU.
Others may have Mac-specific recommendations, but if you prefer Linux I'd recommend the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition pre-installed with Ubuntu.
Posted 2 years ago Permalink -
I'll second Ben's recommendation: an SSD is likely to be the easiest and cheapest way to get a noticeable performance bump. For geographic applications, I've had some difficulties with 8 GB of RAM (perhaps because R requires data to be in-memory).
If you have some really serious number crunching to do, one option is to spool up an Amazon EC2 instance, which will let your run the computation in the cloud on a machine with really high specs, for which you can pay by the hour. But for most DH applications, this is probably overkill.
Posted 2 years ago Permalink -
Peter Organisciak
MemberI'd recommend thinking about the question differently, as @lmullen suggests.
If you want good performance, it's better to think less about local processing and look more at doing your work on a remote server. Amazon's E2 service is great in price and flexibility, I've had good experiences with Azure and Heroku too. My last buy was based on the same consideration of power for DH work, where in hindsight focusing on portability and comfort would have been better.
For priorities, +1 Ben's suggestion Of SSD > RAM > CPU.
Posted 2 years ago Permalink
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