Power system state simulation matrices Yunzhi Cheng, UT Arlington. In MATLAB, the solution to x=A\b is desired, but this can be slow in MATLAB 7.3 because of the speed of sparse QR as compared to sparse Cholesky. Using x=(A'*A)\(A'*b) is faster, but of course yields slightly less accurate (but still acceptable) results. Note that an initial guess to the solution is provided, for use by an iterative method. However, sparse Cholesky with an AMD ordering is very fast for this matrix and thus iterative methods are unlikely to be competitive.