It is not surprising that Mathematica on the Raspberry Pi is slow and clunky. In Stephen Wolfram's words, the command line is "quite zippy" but the notebook interface is "a trifle sluggish by modern standards". I believe the performance issues are due primarily to two reasons:
- The Raspberry Pi performs at about the level of a 300 MHz Pentium II.
- Mathematica isn't optimized for the ARM processor (yet?) and is currently in pilot release
There are in my mind two good reasons for dealing with the sluggish performance of M/RPi:
- Running Mathematica for free on a \$35 credit-card sized computer is just awesome
- The RPi platform allows for hardware interfacing that is not readily available on a PC (or put another way, I'd rather brick a \$35 credit-card sized computer than a \$1000+ PC)
How can end users improve the performance of their M/RPi systems while we wait for Wolfram to roll out optimizations for the RPi?
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