I am trying to justify with my employer the need for 2 computers. We have large scale projects and extract information from our claims system that returns 10 million plus rows utilzing SAS software. Many of our projects take days to run. One project takes 8 days. 3 days to extract the data and 5 days to compile all the data steps that are contained in the 60+ pages of code. While working on this one project, the computer becomes unusable for anything else. It takes 20 mins just to open a single email. It is not the Internet or VPN. The data steps are run on the local machine and can be run without being online or going through our VPN. There are other projects that have the same issues. The computer I run these projects on will take up 97% of the CPU usage from what the task manage states. The specs on this machine are: OS: Windows 7. Processor: Intel (R) Core(TM) i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHZ 2.60GHZ Installed memory RAM 4.00GB 64-bit operating system. We just received developer machines that IT is saying should do the job and allow us to run these large scale projects and still remain productive, but I am not convinced. The specs on the developer machines: OS: Windows 7. Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3360M CPU@ 2.80GHZ 2.80GHZ Installed memory RAM 16.0GB 64-bit operating system Can any of you wonderfully knowledgable IT folks tell me if you think the developer machine is powerful enough to solve the problem. I do not know a lot about hardware. However, isn't the processors job to handle incoming and outgoing traffic. It handles the actual processing of information. The RAM is simply the storage capacity. The storage of data is not our problem, it is the processing of that data. Therefore, we are upgrading .20GHZ with the processor and to me that does not seem like a huge increase in processing. But as I said I don't know a lot about hardware.
I just did some research and found that the i7 2.80 GHZ is good for multitasking and that is what I think they should have put in the developer machine to solve the problem. I suspect the difference between the old and new is small and we will run into the same issues with the developer machine. I will wait and see what some of you think.
Most i7 cpu's run over 3 ghz, Like this one... That one seems a little weak.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116501
