# Unusually bad performance of eigen() compared to eig() in Matlab

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unusually-bad-performance-of-eigen-compared-to-eig-in-matlab/26433>\
**Category:** Performance\
**Tags:** question\
**Created:** [July 16, 2019, 4:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unusually-bad-performance-of-eigen-compared-to-eig-in-matlab/26433 "2019-07-16T16:32:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 15

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 10:28am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unusually-bad-performance-of-eigen-compared-to-eig-in-matlab/26433/15 "2019-07-17T10:28:04Z")

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> [@doit](#):
>
> What kind of optimizations are going on that MKL runs that much faster on my machine??

MKL is a specialized (formerly commercial) LAPACK implementation for Intel architectures by Intel itself. It’s hard for an open source project like OpenBLAS to compete with it.

> [@doit](#):
>
> Maybe Julia should be given the option to use different BLAS/LAPACK implementations on default?

Unfortunately, Julia can’t ship with MKL as explained [here](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/mkl-bundled-julia-by-julia-computing/18585/41). However, apart from MKL.jl, which you are already aware of, you can also build Julia yourself and link it against MKL which is prettry straightforward, especially on Unix systems. You can find instructions [here](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/doc/build).

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