Matlab Speed on OS X, Win7, and Ubuntu

After getting a MacBook Pro, I quickly became frustrated with how slow Matlab runs on it. It's not just the GUI running on X11 but even basic loops running in console mode are significantly slower than the same loops run using the same UNIX version of Matlab on Ubuntu.  Here I'll give some of the numbers I've gotten running Matlab 2008a/b on the above listed OSes.

Simple FFT Loop

    N = 2^15;
    x = rand(1,N);

    for i = 1:5000
        X = fft(x);
    end


Timing Results:

Sliding 2D Correlation


    novelty = zeros(1,size(S,2)-size(CL,2));

    for i = 1:length(novelty)
        novelty(i) = sum(sum(CL.*S(:,i:i+L-1)));
    end


Array Sizes:

> whos
  Name                       Size                  Bytes  Class     Attributes

  CL                       432x432               1492992  double             
  S                        432x11454            39585024  double                     
  novelty                    1x11022               88176  double


Timing Results:           


It's really disheartening to see Matlab perform so poorly on OS X, especially when the same exact version performs so well with Ubuntu.  The Windows version even performs pretty slowly compared to Ubuntu for this correlation loop.  It's too bad the X11 figure windows can get screwy on Ubuntu or else Ubuntu would easily be the preferred OS for running Matlab.