Hardware Specifications

• Processor: Intel Pentium III 650 MHz or equivalent
• Disk Space: 4 GB
• System Memory (RAM): 512 MB required; 1 GB+ recommended
• Internet Access: Required in order to use free-form linguistic input and computable data functionality
• GPU: To use Mathematica 8’s built-in GPU computing capabilities, you’ll need a graphics card that supports OpenCL or CUDA, such as many cards from NVIDIA, AMD, and others.

Mathematica 8 is available on the following platforms:

Windows

Mac

Linux

Mathematica 8 runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems where available.

Windows

• Windows 7
• Windows Vista
• Windows XP (Service Pack 2 or later)
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows HPC Server 2008
• Windows Server 2003
• Window Compute Cluster Server 2003

Mac

• Mac OS X 10.8 Intel
• Mac OS X 10.7 Intel
• Mac OS X 10.6 Intel
• Mac OS X 10.5 Intel

Mathematica 8 is not supported on Mac PowerPC.

Linux

• Ubuntu 7-10
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• CentOS 5
• Debian 5
• openSUSE 11

It is likely that Mathematica will run successfully on other distributions based on the Linux kernel 2.6 or later.
Mathematica supports an X Window System front end, and since Version 7 has used the Qt application framework for its user interface—the same used by the major Linux desktop environment KDE. Regular tests are run on both enterprise and popular open-source Linux distributions.
Some installations may require the 32-bit compatibility library, lib32stdc++6.