Simulation run time vs. PC

I am looking into requesting a Simulation Workstation so my simulations run faster. I ran a comparison of total simulation time of a Simscape model on someone else's Simulation Workstation, and it was slower than my laptop. Does anyone know why? Is there some type of settings on the Workstation that could be changed?

The workstation has an Intel Xeon Gold 6234 CPU @ 3.30GHz (2 processors), with 64 GB RAM. It took 1.5 minutes to complete the simulation.

The laptop has an 11th Gen Intel Cor i7-11850H @ 2.5 GHz, with 16 GB Ram. It took slightly over 1 minute to complete the simulation.

[Walter Roberson]

I note that the Intel Xeon Gold 6234 CPU has 8 physical cores per chip.

I note that the Intel Core i7-11850H CPU has 8 physical cores per chip.

(There goes my hypothesis that the Core i7 might have more physical cores.)

[Mario Malic]

What about higher clock speed? Also, are you sure that your simulation uses both CPUs?

[Meet]

To better understand the difference in simulation times, could you please confirm if the model settings such as simulation mode, solver type, step size, and any other configuration parameters, were they exactly the same on both your laptop and the workstation?

[Jeremy Schaeffer]

The model settings were the exact same for both the laptop and workstation. I'm running the model in normal mode, with a variable step solver (ode15s) with a max step size of 0.005 sec. Relative and absolute tolerances are set to 1e-3, and the reset method is set to Robust.

[Rik]

There is a two year time gap between the CPUs. Could there be a substantial difference in the instructions per cycle between the two? Or might RAM speed be a factor here?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

https://versus.com/en/intel-core-i7-11850h-vs-intel-xeon-gold-6234

The core-i7 (laptop)

• is 10 nm compared to 14 nm
• is 35W power disipated instead of 130W
• runs at 100C instead of 79C
• turbo clocks 4.8 GHz instead of 4.0 GHz
• 768 KB L1 cache instead of 512 KB
• is 15% to 40% faster on most benchmarks