Recommendations for software development

[mmccaskill]

I'm primarily a Java developer (SWT/JFace, JEE (Spring, Hibernate, JSF)) but delve in other things like Cocoa (basic). I have no interest in engaging in video editing.

Would it be wise to buy a single quad-core? Seems a shame to waste the extra $500 for something I will probably not need. I mean for what I do, I don't ever see myself needing 8 cores.

But then again, 3 years ago I never saw myself needing 2-cores

 

[newtech]

If you are doing software development then it is semi important to be able to test on a machine with 8 cores to see how well your app scales.

 

[stoppard]

Another thing to consider is how big your software package is and whether the compilation process can be performed in parallel. If you find yourself doing really large builds using build software that can work in parallel you will benefit greatly from 8 cores. However you may also need a large amount of ram.

 

[mmccaskill]

Well we have a few quad core boxes around running VMWare Free Server on Windows, where we have 2-4 VMs per box.

I'm just thinking of times where maybe I want to run Parallels. I assume 8 cores would be better than 4 on that, meaning I could compile and execute Java and run Parallels at the same time.