2 vs 4 core i7 questions

The sony vaio z's all only have the 2 core i7's (2640), versus the quad i7's in the mbp (15).

1) What is going to be the noticeable difference for my music/internet/excel/word/basic stuff usage? The biggest thing I do is output 1080p movies to my hdtv while using a separate screen on my laptop to word process/excel/web browse/etc..

2) Is the quad going to "future-proof" me more than months than 2 core? Is it going to be worth it, or just for 6 months extra?

 

Quads are the new standard, but a 2640 should be fine what you're doing. Make sure you're getting it cheap though because there won't be much demand for dual cores soon, so resale won't be great

 

Thanks, it's for my choice of laptop so I wouldn't be able to upgrade it.. as long as it'll be good for 3 years or so I'll be happy.

 

Wah? Dual core processors will still be used for the next 5-10 years.

 

the majority of users (not counting those on this forum) would be fine with a dual core setup. Dual core is here to stay like tHE j0KER said.

 

10 years is a huge stretch. Learn your Moore's.

 

Every two year transistor count doubles right?

 

Quads are definitely not the new standards for the mainstream user. Dual cores will be the mainstream processor type for quite some time, especially with HT. Even the Core 2 Duos still run Windows 7/OS X well

 

For those kinds of usage patterns, you'll be fine.

Nope. A quad-core will not future-proof you for 6 months. The reality is that CPU speed and performance really doesn't matter, as long as you have a CPU that is "good enough." And a dual-core Core i7 is definitely "good enough."

The only people who really benefit from a quad-core CPU are people that run very CPU-intensive applications. Video encoding and some CPU-heavy games (Civilization 5, Starcraft 2) are two examples of that. For the stuff you're doing, a "good enough" dual-core CPU will be fine. When you do eventually replace your laptop several years down the road, it will not be because your CPU is underpowered.

 

You're misusing Moore's law.

Moore's law says that transistor count on a chip doubles every 2 years or so. It is related to hardware manufacturing of integrated circuits.

Moore's law does not discuss anything about performance demands of future software or OS'es, or how many processing threads software / OS will use, or how many processing cores a CPU will have. 10 years ago, we were using single-core Pentium 3's. If you were correct (which you are not), then your interpretation of Moore's Law would mean that we would all have 32-core CPUs, or running software that can take advantage of 32-core CPUs.

 

The GHz war is over and has been for awhile. Performance increases in the CPU don't add up to real world performance.

Any recent dual CPU with a a speed of 2 GHz or better, the hard drive is the bottle neck. The speed to which the programs can be processed by the CPU is really lacking. One could argue that SSDs have fixed this, but it is however only to a point.

You could slap 100 cores in a computer and it would not matter if the I/O could not push/pull the data fast enough.

So with this said, get an SSD and the fastest memory possible and from there as long as modern, it don't really matter. BUS speeds and I/O are becoming even more important then CPU performance alone. So dual vs quad is really a matter of opinion and only truly CPU tasks take full advantage of cores.

For most a dual core will do. When we throw in HT the dual core only gets more attractive.