R Batteries Included (R 4.6.1 with OpenBLAS and Intel MKL)

R on Windows made faster
Author

Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas S.

Published

September 15, 2026

Before the main content: I am creating an R Community on Google Groups. You can join the group using this form.

Do you want a free, zero-config performance upgrade for R on Windows?

Switching linear algebra libraries on Linux is a breeze, but doing it on Windows is particularly complicated. R on Windows provides a numerical library, libRblas, that just works but that can be much faster. To solve this, I created R Batteries Included.

R Batteries Included is an R distribution that offers a simplified installer featuring:

  • Automatic CPU tuning: Detects your hardware to maximize linear algebra speeds.
  • Library flexibility: Choose between OpenBLAS and Intel MKL for faster linear algebra operations.
  • Dependencies handling: Ships pre-configured components so you can install packages from source (e.g., GitHub) without seeing C/C++ compiler errors.

No code modifications. No workflow changes. Just your exact same scripts, running faster.

See the plots showing the speed gains. I used the famous AT&T Benchmark.