Daniel - Thanks for your reply. Let me ask the question in another way. Does Wolfram do benchmark studies of Mathematica across the 3 editions of Mathematica (Home, Starter, and Standard)? Even better, does Wolfram also do that across a representative sample of hardware?

Maybe the answers are proprietary. If so, please ignore.

I'm simply trying to diagnose what I believe is slow performance due to computation limitations. Here's an example. One recent project dealt with the synchronization of phase coupled oscillators (Kuramoto model). So lots of use of NDSolve, but a simple program. And even for a trial situation with small parameters (eg, number of oscillators, number of timesteps, and number of coupling strengths), the elapsed time is around 40 minutes. That seems excessive. System monitor shows 8 CPUs, with one pegged at 100% and the others near 0%, then a hand-off to another CPU, and so on.

In general I would not expect the Standard version to perform significantly better than the Home edition. But there may be certain types of computation for which it does do better. If you provide examples that you believe are slow as compared to expectations then it might be possible to say something more concrete.

As for the terminology you cite, it applies mostly to explicitly parallelized code e.g. using ParallelMap. There may also be numeric linear algebra routines that are sensitive to number of available cores, but I do not think they are affected by the Home vs. Standard distinction.

I should mention that this is a bit outside my expertise. Others may be able to give more definitive responses.