With the help of some on this board, I am in the midst of an upgrade. I don't do anything cpu intensive - I don't game, I don't transcode, I don't even serve up media. I just do java software development. The majority of my cpu time is fairly idle, with the exception of software builds and starting/stopping app servers. Sometimes I do rapidly prototype certain parallel processing situations, but it's not all the time.
Anyway, my dev machine has been an off-the-shelf gateway sandybridge i5 2300 (2.8ghz), 12gb ram, and kingston hyperx 120gb ssd, running Mint14. I don't have to wait on the machine very often, and when I do, it's not usually very long.
I just built an i7 4770, 16gb ram, and samsung 840 pro 256, running Mint15. Holy shit this thing is just stupid fst. The different between the two machines isn't night and day, but it is appreciable.
One of the projects that I'm working on right now takes 8 seconds to perform a maven compile>test cycle on the i5. On the i7, it takes 5 seconds. That does not include snapshot dependencies. It's just straight compilation/testing.
The i5 takes around 7 seconds to start jboss AS7 and deploy this test project. The i7 machine takes 4 seconds.
So, the differences aren't huge. But the upgrade was completely worth it. The upgrade was only ~$900, and now I've got an extra machine in which I can spin up a few more in-memory-datagrid nodes when needed.
The biggest latency now is network access. If I only had gigabit internet to *everything*, my computlng life would be pretty close to ideal.
Anyway, my dev machine has been an off-the-shelf gateway sandybridge i5 2300 (2.8ghz), 12gb ram, and kingston hyperx 120gb ssd, running Mint14. I don't have to wait on the machine very often, and when I do, it's not usually very long.
I just built an i7 4770, 16gb ram, and samsung 840 pro 256, running Mint15. Holy shit this thing is just stupid fst. The different between the two machines isn't night and day, but it is appreciable.
One of the projects that I'm working on right now takes 8 seconds to perform a maven compile>test cycle on the i5. On the i7, it takes 5 seconds. That does not include snapshot dependencies. It's just straight compilation/testing.
The i5 takes around 7 seconds to start jboss AS7 and deploy this test project. The i7 machine takes 4 seconds.
So, the differences aren't huge. But the upgrade was completely worth it. The upgrade was only ~$900, and now I've got an extra machine in which I can spin up a few more in-memory-datagrid nodes when needed.
The biggest latency now is network access. If I only had gigabit internet to *everything*, my computlng life would be pretty close to ideal.
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