Quad i5 vs. Quad i7 -13" MBP

[wombat94]

I currently have a dual core i5 Early 2015 MBP... I love the machine and form factor.

The one thing that I am not thrilled with is the performance of VMWare Fusion when running a windows VM.

I use a 15" Mid 2014 MBP for work and it is fine with running multiple VMs at the same time as I have different dev environments (all Windows VMs) running.

On the work machine, all the VMs are dual core - and I can run multiples at once with no issue.

So the quad core is of particular interest to me. For personal use, I will only ever need to run one Windows VM at once - though I might run a couple of small/low resource Linux VMs if experimenting with self-hosted services.

My question is going to be the balance of upgrades between extra ram vs. upgrading to i7 CPU from the i5.

I know that there are no real-world experiences yet, but I'm just wondering if I would be better off with i7 8GB or i5 16GB for the scenario I've described. I probably not be able to swing the i7 16GB combo.

Any thoughts?

 

[cman-uk]

I'm in a similar predicament.

i5 CPU + 16Gb RAM {{{versus}}} i7 CPU + 16Gb RAM

Most will simply advise to go for the highest spec you can afford. But I'd like to understand how significant the difference will be....

 

[leman]

For your scenario? i5 with 16GB, no contest. If you are working with memory-hungry virtual machines, having more RAM will have much bigger impact than a marginally faster CPU.

 

[macintoshmac]

I currently have a dual core i5 Early 2015 MBP... I love the machine and form factor.

The one thing that I am not thrilled with is the performance of VMWare Fusion when running a windows VM.

I use a 15" Mid 2014 MBP for work and it is fine with running multiple VMs at the same time as I have different dev environments (all Windows VMs) running.

On the work machine, all the VMs are dual core - and I can run multiples at once with no issue.

So the quad core is of particular interest to me. For personal use, I will only ever need to run one Windows VM at once - though I might run a couple of small/low resource Linux VMs if experimenting with self-hosted services.

My question is going to be the balance of upgrades between extra ram vs. upgrading to i7 CPU from the i5.

I know that there are no real-world experiences yet, but I'm just wondering if I would be better off with i7 8GB or i5 16GB for the scenario I've described. I probably not be able to swing the i7 16GB combo.

Any thoughts?

Since you are happy with dual core performance, save money and spend on quad core instead of hex.