Does computer hardware bandwidth (and hence higher PCIe level) matter to speed up Stata?

[James Park]

Now PCIe4 is the newest consumer model. PCIe5 may come out this year.

Does computer hardware bandwidth (and hence higher PCIe level) of CPU and SDD matter to speed up Stata?

Worth it to upgrade my computer parts because of this?

[Jared Greathouse]

Possibly. I know for fact that the more cores you have, the faster it is.


I wouldn't spend a trillion dollars on this though just for speed's sake.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I'd spend my money on these three things in this order: CPU (the fastest chip with at least as many cores as you are licensed for), RAM (8 GB minimum to allow for background system usage plus Stata), SSD (over magnetic storage).

[Clyde Schechter]

I am by no means a hardware expert. But I think a lot depends on the kind of work you do. If you are heavy into computationally intensive things, then the CPU speed would make a real difference. But if you are just doing routine kinds of regressions, but applying them to large data sets, SSD vs hard drive and more RAM both can make an enormous difference; CPU speed, not so much.

Another consideration is the complexity of the code you write. If you write long, complex code that takes a long time to develop and debug, it may be that execution speed makes very little difference as the final production run may be a tiny fraction of total project time. On the other hand, if your analyses are pretty short and simple to code and you don't have to puzzle out much in the way of data management, but you work with large amounts of data (either observations or variables) then the reverse may be true.