This answer was current as of August 27, 2004. At this time there are not even any dreams about running NeuroShell Trader on Mac or Linux, so we would rule them out.

Regarding AMD or Intel, we would purchase whatever you are using now for compatibility. There are Nth digit differences in floating point arithmetic that we have seen between Intel and other processors, possibly because of how the compilers do rounding on the different machines. It usually bothers people when they get different results switching between processors. Changes in the Nth digit tend to make bigger differences with neural nets because of all the calculations, which in turn make bigger differences in trading.

Since NeuroShell keeps everything in memory, more RAM is always good, especially if you like large numbers of ticker symbols or large numbers of walk forwards, or big models, or lots of intraday bars in your models.

We haven’t started thinking about 64 bit, but it is a future possibility. We wouldn’t spend your money on it in the near future however. The same is true of hyperthreading. Neither of these two things is even as likely to be helpful as the next item:

Multiple processors working on the same optimization are likely with us in a nearer future than the other things above. Before too long we may have a NeuroShell version that uses multiple processors on a network as well. However, your money right now might be better spend on a really fast processor unless:

1. You have other things that the multiprocessor will help, or
2. You want to run several copies of NeuroShell on the same machine right now, but doing different models, or
3. You have enough money for really fast multiple processors