Advice on ideal Powerpivot machine

[masplin]

I am looknig ot buy a new pc to run my powerpivot models on. The current one takes about 2 hours to calculate so hoping to get some speed improvments.

1. Presumably more RAM is better than less
2. Excel has an option to use multi-threading calcuations presumably meaning that more prcoessors is better thna one large processor. Is this the case with powerpivot i.e. is it better to spend the same money on lots of smaller processors or one huge processor?
3. Anything else work looking out for n a spec?

Thanks for any advice

Mike

 

[scottsen]

You want fast RAM, and it's probably worth looking for a processor with a large L2 cache. You prefer a fast processor to many cores.

But 2 hours calc?! Impressive. ~6 posts on perf you might scan through: Performance Archives | Tiny Lizard

 

[masplin]

I knows its rubbish but I have to rebuild the whole thing soon as moving form linked tables to sql query. At that point I'll remove all my early errors and streamline the whole thing.

So Powerpivot can'ty make any use of multiple processors so one huge very fast one is better?

 

[scottsen]

Yes and no.

There are two engines as part of power pivot... the storage engine and the formula engine. The storage engine is STUPID fast, and multi-threaded. The formula engine and slower and single-threaded. More cores won't really HURT you, but more processor speed will definately HELP you.

I haven't tried one of the newer procs with 20-24mb L2 cache... but my bet is... they are awesome for powerpivot. They also tend to cost $1k usd just for the processor...

 

[masplin]

Thanks for your advice