FFTW vs Matlab FFT

Question

I posted this on matlab central but didn\'t get any responses so I figured I\'d repost here.

I recently wrote a simple routine in Matlab that uses an FFT in a for-l

Answer 1

This is classic performance gain thanks to low-level and architecture-specific optimization.

Matlab uses FFT from the Intel MKL (Math Kernel Library) binary (mkl.dll). These are routines optimized (at assembly level) by Intel for Intel processors. Even on AMD's it seems to give nice performance boosts.

FFTW seems like a normal c library that is not as optimized. Hence the performance gain to use the MKL.