Hello all, I have a little question about the speed of numpy vs IDL 7.0. I did a very simple little check by computing just a cosine in a loop. I was quite surprised to see an order of magnitude of difference between numpy and IDL, I would have thought that for such a basic function, the speed would be approximatively the same. I suppose that some of the difference may come from the default data type of 64bits in numpy and 32 bits in IDL. Is there a way to change the numpy default data type (without recompiling) ? And I'm not an expert at all, maybe there is a better explanation, like a better use of the several CPU core by IDL ? I'm working with windows 7 64 bits on a core i7. any hint is welcome. Thanks. Here the IDL code : Julian1 = SYSTIME( /JULIAN , /UTC ) for j=0,9999 do begin for i=0,999 do begin a=cos(2*!pi*i/100.) endfor endfor Julian2 = SYSTIME( /JULIAN , /UTC ) print, (Julian2-Julian1)*86400.0 print,cpt end result: % Compiled module: $MAIN$. 2.9999837 The python code: from numpy import * from time import time time1 = time() for j in range(10000): for i in range(1000): a=cos(2*pi*i/100.) time2 = time() print time2-time1 result: In [2]: run python_test_speed.py 24.1809999943