Benchmarks (cont’d)

Microsoft Excel 2007

New to our test suite is Excel 2007. Have you ever read that OpenOffice is awesome? Or read a review that said “for Microsoft Office, you don’t need a fast CPU?” These statements are only true for casual users.

When it comes to true power users of Excel (or for that matter, Microsoft Word) there is no alternative to Microsoft Office. Microsoft has the monopoly because it’s that good. In the case of Excel 2007, Microsoft has taken the initiative of implementing multi-core calcuation support. This provides tremendous performance benefits for financial users who rely on complex macros and spreadsheets.



Importantly, Excel 2007 is also an embarassingly parallel problem since there will almost always be enough individual cells to allow independent calculation without saturing the number of CPU cores. This benchmark was provided by Intel as an Excel spreadsheet. Our review of data shows no obvious bias.

In the Excel 2007 “Common Calculations” stress test, approximately 28,000 sets of calculations are performed (addition, subtraction, division, rounding, and square root) along with min, max, and median. Although 28,000 sets is a larger number than what most Excel users will need, it’s not unreasonable to have a dataset with 10,000 cells. In that regard, the Intel V8 platform means perceptibly instantaneous calculations versus waiting 7 seconds on Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz. Depending on your workload, those extra 7 seconds may be worth several thousand dollars.

The second data set is a more complex model of Black-Sholes Pricing, which again is designed to be more extensive than typical real-world use. (Though it is a reasonable data set for an Economics grad student). Again, the advantage of 8 cores is obvious.

If you’re using Excel to do heavy comptutation, make sure you’ve upgraded to version 2007 to get the benefit of multicore computation, and ask your boss for the fastest computer you can get your hands on.