Multi-Core Processing With EViews

If you're using a "multi-core" computer for your econometrics work, you want to be able to take advantage of those extra cores - at least when it's efficient to do so. Some tasks, such as Monte Carlo or bootstrap simulations, lend themselves well to multi-processing. However, not all tasks will benefit - more on this in another, more detailed post..

EViews 7 and EViews 8 incorporate automatic sensing and use of the number of CPU "cores" your machine has. Unlike some other packages, which shall remain nameless, you don't have to purchase a different version of the package to get this facility.

There's just one caveat: in the "Help" file for EViews 8 you'll find the following statement:

"This is guaranteed to work with Intel processors, and, to our knowledge, should work with other brands of processors as well."

Unless you've tinkered with the global settings for you installation of EViews, you'll be getting the full benefit of your machine's processing power when using this package. However, you can check this as follows:

1. Start EViews (7 or 8).
2. Choose the "Options" tab at the top of the main window.
3. Choose: "General options", "Advanced system options".
4. Then, in the "Multi-processor/multi-core use" drop-down, make sure that the setting is either "Auto" (the EViews default), or is the number of cores you want to assign.

Any change that you make to this setting will take effect once you re-start EViews.

© 2013, David E. Giles