I can reproduce this slowdown on OS X. I got 220 s (v9) vs 280 s (v10).

You can actually see the test code used in the benchmarking. The code for "Matrix Arithmetic" in Mathematica 10 is the following.

Module[{m}, 
 AbsoluteTiming[SeedRandom[1]; m = RandomReal[{}, {840, 840}]; 
  Do[(1.` + 0.5` m)^127, {50}];]]

On my laptop (MacBook Pro Late 2013, i5 2.4GHz), the output is {1.842847, Null} by Mathematica 10, while it is {1.115800, Null} by Mathematica 9. From run to run, the exact time changes, but it is certain that M10 runs slower than M9 for this code.

I have observed that the number of processing cores was detected to be 2 in M10, while it is 4 in M9. I changed the number of parallel kernels manually, but it didn't affect the output of the code above.

On the other hand, the "Matrix Multiplication"

Module[{m1, m2}, 
 AbsoluteTiming[SeedRandom[1]; m1 = RandomReal[{}, {1050, 1050}]; 
  m2 = RandomReal[{}, {1050, 1050}]; Do[m1.m2, {12}]]]

gives {0.581776, Null} by M10, and {1.421713, Null} by M9. Again, the exact time fluctuates a bit, but it is certain that M10 runs the multiplication faster than M9.

Hi Douglas,

yes, it appears that the "old machines" are not benchmarked with the new release, but if the tests are the same and I compare my own computer with both versions, i.e. MMA9 and MMA10, that should be valid, shouldn't it?

I meant the argument to suggest that the benchmark tests are probably the same for both versions, which is likely based on the numbers for the "standard machines". So, then it should be valid to compare the two versions 9/10 on the same machine.

M.

No, we do not really know whether they are identical, but the 3.07Ghz i7 950 (8 cores) is set to 1 in both benchmarks, i.e. the benchmarks are normalised to that machine. So there is a hope that they are the same.

More interestingly, it appears that all its individual timings for all individual tests are the same for the i7 in V9 and V10 , too, so that could suggest that the benchmarks are supposed to be the same. In fact, none of the machines that are in both benchmarks have changed the individual timings. So they are probably all the same tests run in V9. The comparison on the V10 benchmark are most likely compared to the machines in V9 - at least for the "older" machines. The top scorer in the V10 benchmark is the Mac Pro, which might have been tested under V10. I agree that much of this is mere speculation.

You are absolutely right, it would indeed be nice to know which bits are slower and why. It is strange that "Matrix Arithmetic" got quite a bit slower. Can anyone run the benchmark on something other than OSX? It appeared in MMA9 that OSX was a bit slower than Linux systems that had lower specifications. I think that we ran Windows in a sandbox (parallels or so) on a Mac and MM9 was faster there than on OSX.

I have tested a couple of my programs and they do appear to run faster in MMA10 than in MMA9.

Cheers, Marco

Can you share the exact code you used to benchmark this?