I work in neuroscience (finishing my PhD), and primarily use MATLAB to analyze large amounts of neural and hemodynamic time courses. Up until now, I've been remotely accessing an enterprise server in my lab to do all of my data analysis. I just transitioned my primary workflow to my new 16" MacBook, and I wanted to share a comparison of computation speeds:
Task: Loading ~180 92x12000 matrixes, applying a sliding correlation window to each, then k-means clustering an exemplar dataset 100 times (size: 1770x8464)
Here are the execution times for identical scripts:
Macbook Pro: 143 seconds
Enterprise Server: 234 seconds
I'm not sure of the exact specs of the server I use, but I do know it is <4 years old, and does get used regularly by others, so is probably sharing a computation load with other processes. It's also not well optimized for MATLAB, and is entirely CPU computation side to my knowledge.
Conclusion: The base model is really fast.