Figure 2 and 3 in this paper (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gcbd/vignettes/gcbd.p...) show atlas is only better than an unoptimized ("reference") BLAS implementation and that it is many times slower than the winner GotoBLAS (now OpenBLAS http://xianyi.github.com/OpenBLAS/), which is written assembly by Kazushige Goto while he worked at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Edit: Article in the NY Times about Mr. Goto http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/technology/28super.html?sc...
Figure 2 and 3 in this paper (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gcbd/vignettes/gcbd.p...) show atlas is only better than an unoptimized ("reference") BLAS implementation and that it is many times slower than the winner GotoBLAS (now OpenBLAS http://xianyi.github.com/OpenBLAS/), which is written assembly by Kazushige Goto while he worked at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Edit: Article in the NY Times about Mr. Goto http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/technology/28super.html?sc...