Time Tagger is supported on Windows (10 or higher) and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 18.04 or higher and CentOS 8. Our high-performance GUI Time Tagger Lab is available for Windows only. For Linux users, the Web Application is still available, but it is deprecated and not maintained anymore. Unfortunately, the Time Tagger is still not supported on macOS. If you need to use the Time Tagger with macOS, you can have a look at this article for possible solutions.
One of the most important factors limiting the Time Tagger’s performance is the PC’s CPU, which handles data collection and analysis. While modern mid-level PCs typically include USB 3 ports and at least 16 GB of RAM, selecting an optimal CPU is essential for time tagging applications. Preprocessing the time-tag stream from the Time Tagger on your PC is performed by a single CPU thread, necessitating high single-core CPU performance. The CPU clock speed is the primary determinant of this performance in modern processors. An updated list of single-thread CPU performance can be found here. As a general rule, any processor on the list with a CPU mark greater than 4200 is a good candidate for achieving the best performance in streaming and preprocessing time-tags from the Time Tagger to the PC. Once the time tags are on your PC and ready for analysis, each measurement defined in the TimeTagger API (such as Counter, Correlation, Histogram, etc.) runs on its own thread. Therefore, each measurement can be bound to any available CPU core. If you require a large number of measurements to run simultaneously, then the CPU’s multi-core/multi-threading capabilities become an important factor in addition to its single-core speed.
You can find an updated list of CPU performance (single-thread and multi-thread combined) at this link. Again, as a general rule, any processor in the top 20% of this list suffices for the requested performance. Even if a PC’s CPU is not listed among the top performers in the above list, it can still be used to perform measurements using our Time Tagger. The performance (such as the transfer rate) may not be the best, but it will still be sufficient for most applications.
To help you estimate the performance achievable with your CPU, we conducted some tests to determine the maximum transfer rate that can be achieved with different CPUs using Time Tagger X. The results are listed in this article.