If a job takes 12 min. to do a calculation, would faster GHz Memory make a difference

Happy Hopping

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Say you're doing a Excel Iteration calculation, and the calculation takes 12 min. on 1333MHz, DDR3 Memory, and we decide to upgrade to much faster memory, would it make a noticeable difference?
 
I do not think you can get a definitive answer to that without someone having your calculation and trying. You can however test yourself by changing your memory speed in BIOS and see if it makes a large difference. Try to set your ram to DDR3 1600 and see if the benchmark changes much. If your system is unstable at that try DDR3 1066 and see if there is a large slowdown.
 
There is no way to know for sure without benchmarking as Happy Hopping said. The only way to make a process faster is to speed up whatever piece is holding it back. If you just make the fastest part of the production line even faster it won't make a difference.

Based on your description that this is an iterative calculation in Excel I don't think faster ram will help - all the data needed is probably fitting in the CPU cache, so your bottleneck is the speed and efficiency that the CPU is processing it.

If you want to do it faster you might also look at how you've structured your calculation too (the formulas). Are you repeating any steps in each iteration that could be done in once advance? Are you using a slow exhaustive method to find something in a list that you could locate faster?
 
Based on your description that this is an iterative calculation in Excel I don't think faster ram will help - all the data needed is probably fitting in the CPU cache, so your bottleneck is the speed and efficiency that the CPU is processing it.

That would be my expectation as well.
 
In this case? Faster memory isn't going to help unless that Excel sheet is absolutely huge. How many cells are in the spreadsheet?

Last I checked Excel's calculations are done in a single thread without SSE. If that calculation is for work or some other purpose, and you need it regularly, it might be a good idea to look into some multithreaded SSE code to replace Excel.
 
since faster memory speed doesn't solve the problem (the spreadsheet is not mine), I'm going to go w/ more core, as microsoft said they support SMP on excel 2007
 
If you've not already upgraded, be sure to check that the SMP is being used. Do you have multiple cores now? If so, be sure that when you run the calculation all the cores are being used. If only one is being used, then adding more cores won't help.
 
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