General performance question

Projects Programming
1

I have a set up where Matlab reads data from an Arduino board (Mega 2560) constantly - coordinates of a joystick device.

As part of this I need to do some processing of the values that the Ardunio reads. I was wondering if for basic integer math operations, like division and multiplication, if it would always be faster for such processing to happen within Matlab, as opposed to within the Arduino sketch program?

I would intuitively think so given the massive differences in clock speeds between a modern PC and an Arduino board, but maybe not?

2

You'll be bottlenecked by the Serial transmission speed - for basic integer math, the Arduino is plenty fast enough. The last time I calculated, I think that you can fit about 1110 clock cycles per byte of transmission at 115200baud - that's quite a few integer operations. Generally you should only be worried if its especially memory intensive, since the Arduino doesn't have much SRAM (2 kilobytes).