A few laptop questions

[DietDrThunder]

1) Is there much of a performance difference between getting a laptop with a 5th Gen i7 vs. a 6th Gen i7?
2) Other than Dell XPS line or Mac Book Pro, what other laptops have comparable battery use hours (ex. Dell claims XPS has 11 hours of battery life). Also, I'm not concerned about gaming. I use a desktop for gaming.
3) If running windows 10 Pro, and wanting to run VMWare or VirtualBox with a flavor of Linux, is an i5 with 8GB of RAM enough, or do I need an i7 with 16GB of ram? Windows 10 will be used primarily for office, will be using the Linux VM for running Eclipse and compiling C++ code for Linux and VxWorks.

 

[blankslate]

1) There doesn't seem to be much of a difference.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-6700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-5700HQ

according to the above link the 6th gen i7 seems to be an evolutionary advance over the 5th gen i7. the newer cpu uses a bit less power while the 5th gen i7 has better single core performance.

2) No idea really.

3) I'm thinking that you would want 16GB of RAM for VMs, I'm not speaking from experience but I have seen other threads on Anandtech where people mentioned the more RAM the better when using VMs and the tech podcasts I listen to also agree with the sentiment.


____________

 

[fralexandr]

The newer skylake stuff has more video/codec support if you plan on using it to watch movies or something in the future.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9562/intels-skylake-gpu-analyzing-the-media-capabilities

 

[Commodus]

1. 6th-gen does give you a boost in integrated graphics performance and a minor boost in overall computing power, but it's not night and day.

2. Microsoft's Surface Book also has very long battery life.

3. RAM is ultimately what you need most for virtualization. With code in the background, you may want to spring for 16GB of RAM on whatever system you get. You don't need a Core i7 unless shorter compile times are particularly important.