You'll need to ask the person who built R (you haven't told us). If this was a binary CRAN build, you are asked to discuss that only on R-sig-mac, and you will find plenty of discussion on that list's archives. Note that

- this is Mac-specific (not mentioned in your subject line)
- it even depends on the chipset of the Macs in question.

On Mon, 7 Feb 2011, Joseph Kunkel wrote:

R Version 2.12.1 (2010-10-15) vs 2.12.0 has slowed down 8 fold for dual core and 17 fold for dual-core-dual-processor Macs. I have checked this result on 3 different macs using the following R-script:

Using Version 2.12.0 on a dual core dual processor Mac:
source("http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/pub/R/CuriousResult.R";)
matrix multiplication      43.543   1.308  14.788
tcrossprod                 41.147   1.286  11.9
transposition and reuse    40.407   3.525  43.606
elementwise after reshape  21.474   1.828  23.124
columnwise sapply          34.695   32.35  66.592
for loop over columns      37.237   29.471 67.2

On the same day upgrading to 2.12.1 on the same dual core dual processor Mac:

source("http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/pub/R/CuriousResult.R";)
matrix multiplication     256.775   2.178 256.919
tcrossprod                246.609   1.987 247.075
transposition and reuse    39.622   4.602  43.883
elementwise after reshape  21.017   2.343  23.258
columnwise sapply    39.393  37.069  75.834
for loop over columns      35.461  33.155  68.165

It seems clear that the upgrade to 2.12.1 has resulted in matrix multiplication using only one core. Notice that the other techniques that avoid matrix multiplication seem to stay the same but the two approaches that use matrix multiply have degraded worse than the expected loss of just 4 fold. Is it possible that a different matrix multiply library was used in changing from version 2.12.0 to 2.12.1?

Joe Kunkel
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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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