Is Mac an option for working MATLAB?

Una MacBook Air 2020 con procesador i5 de décima generación me permitiría trabajar bien con matlab?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The new (2020) MacBook Air with i5 processor has quad-core 1.1 GHz base rate with turbo boost to 3.5 GHz.

Turbo boost is used only if the total heat for the boosted processors would be low enough. With that system, you would probably routinely be able to run a single processor at boost speeds, but as you started doing hard work on all 4 processors, they might only boost a bit, depending how hot the environment is.

When you do vectorized mathematics in MATLAB, and you are using large enough matrices, then MATLAB will automatically use all of your processors... so they would all be creating heat, and so you might not be able to get full boost out of them. You should probably not count on getting more than 2 GHz for that kind of processing.

The MacBook Air has 8 Gigabytes of memory, but can be configured for 16 Gigabytes. For the kind of work I do, I was finding 8 Gigabytes to be a limit; I recommend the 16 gigabytes.

So, you can use MATLAB with MacBook Air 2020. However, it is not clear that it will work well -- that would depend on what kind of MATLAB work you were using it for.

[John D'Errico]

Note the excessive heat generated over a long term can eventually cause damage to your computer. We actually used an external fan for one laptop, kicking on only when needed. When we were using that laptop heavily, we also installed a utility to tell us if something was overheating, and how hot, etc.

It is also true that a laptop computer can easily get hot enough that it can burn you if held in your lap. And laptops tend to have poor fans at best. I think the MacBook Air has no fan at all? (Unsure about that.)

Computers that find themselves overheating with insufficient cooling are typically designed to intentionally throttle their clock speeds down, this forces the computer to work less hard, generating less heat. The net result is a slower computer. As Walter says, turbo-boost goes away.

I will also point out that even on my desktop system, it is trivially easy to force my internal fans to kick on full force. Just get all 8 cores working flat out, and soon you will hear the fans doing their best to cool things off.

[Daniela Cruz]

Muchas gracias a ambos por la información tan completa, para el uso que le daré (Una materia de la uni, ni siquiera diario) creo que me podría funcionar bien pero igual veré si otra opción me funciona mejor. Buen día

Answer 2

[madhan ravi]

https://www.mathworks.com/support/requirements/matlab-system-requirements.html - everything is there

[Daniela Cruz]

Thank you!