Computation time of iterative equation shorter than appropriate vectorized form!

I"m using cvx with MATLAB and sdpt3 solver. The computation time of my optimization problem is with following iterative equation

for i=1:N
X(i+1) == X(i) - I(i) * C;
end

two times shorter, than with the vectorized equation:

X(1) == X0;
X(2:(N+1)) == X0 .* ones(1,N) - sum(repmat(I,N,1) .* tril(ones(N,N),0),2)’ .* C;

Outside the CVX enviroment the second equation is multiple times faster using MATLAB. Can somebody tell me what is happening in the background of CVX causing this?

I don’t really know exactly why one would be slower or faster than the other. But CVX itself isn’t designed for speed, rather for convenience. If you’ve found a case where for loops are faster, then by all means, you should take advantage of it!