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I too am weighing up the i5 vs i7 debate. Initially I thought the i7 but given there are very few hyperthreading capable apps out now, and will probably be 50/50 in two years time(?), does anyone have a good idea whether it would be better to just order the i5 and take the extra cash that I would have spent on the i7, and upgrade to 8mb RAM?

So, it becomes i5 8mb RAM vs. i7 4mb RAM?

I'm a web designer/developer so my software isn't massively processor intensive, but I can end up with more than a dozen apps open at a time and 20 browser windows - in which case I can see real benefits in the Finder from the extra RAM boost.

Thoughts?
 
I too am weighing up the i5 vs i7 debate. Initially I thought the i7 but given there are very few hyperthreading capable apps out now, and will probably be 50/50 in two years time(?), does anyone have a good idea whether it would be better to just order the i5 and take the extra cash that I would have spent on the i7, and upgrade to 8mb RAM?

So, it becomes i5 8mb RAM vs. i7 4mb RAM?

I'm a web designer/developer so my software isn't massively processor intensive, but I can end up with more than a dozen apps open at a time and 20 browser windows - in which case I can see real benefits in the Finder from the extra RAM boost.

Thoughts?

Do you think you would see greater performance from getting a SSD for the OS and applications vs. upgrading the RAM right away? How much RAM do you normally use? At least for me, SSD>8gb RAM at first.
 
Apple owed me a new computer. They allowed me to pay the upcharge from the base 27" to the i7. I figured I'm paying a couple hundred total for the computer so why not get the i7.

I looked at the Anandtech numbers and going by that, felt it was the best way to go to future-proof things a bit. Dealing with HD video, it seems to excel there vs. the i5 and over the course of maybe 3 years of ownership, felt the $200 would pay for itself for sure.
 
Is this all HT? On both Win and Mac OS? And on all machines? MP? Under 10.6.?

Im not too sure. all i know is that when my dad got his Mbox/protools 7.5 he had to go into the processor settings on windows and turn off hyper-threading. Maybe digidesign has decided it enjoys the extra processor power im not too sure.. im also not too sure if it affects mac osx as well. although i guess if your using the same processors, and chip architecture the same barriers- in terms of system resources would be in place as well. right?? I never had to turn anything off though when installed protools on either of my 2 machines.

check on DUC if you have digi hardware/software.. otherwise have a ganders around see what you can find. :)

PTP
 
Do you think you would see greater performance from getting a SSD for the OS and applications vs. upgrading the RAM right away? How much RAM do you normally use? At least for me, SSD>8gb RAM at first.

Well, yes, there's THAT option, but even a 128GB SSD costs about twice what the RAM upgrade would. At the moment I'm only using 4GB RAM, but also need to upgrade to SL and CS4, so I think my system overheads are going to increase as well.
 
I thought the i7 but given there are very few hyperthreading capable apps out now
Can a program determine what is and isn't a virtual core, OSX recognizes double the cores, so shouldn't they be treated like normal, or am I wrong?
 
Can a program determine what is and isn't a virtual core, OSX recognizes double the cores, so shouldn't they be treated like normal, or am I wrong?

I dont believe apps determine HT use. See:

This technology is transparent to operating systems and programs. All that is required to take advantage of hyper-threading is symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support in the operating system, as the logical processors appear as standard separate processors.

(taken from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading). OSX does recognise HT so it should have nothing to do with the apps.
 
Are you sure this is accurate? HT is a CPU Level implementation which enables your CPU to effectively double its number of cores. To test this, encode a video and you will see 8 cores using 100% of a CPU rather than 4 (tested on a i7 Win 7 machine). Grand Central Dispatch is a S/W level version of this (which leads me to think it wont be nearly so effective).

In all PC benchmarks a i7 860 performs video encoding much faster than a i5 750. I assume it will be the same for a Mac.

yes, HT is only virtual, so the other 4 are just 4 virtual cores, like someone said here, or was it the other thread, nothing beats the real thing.

Basically its like this, in order to take advantage of multicores, multi-threaded apps are made.

Chrome is actually a good implementation of multi threaded apps, what they did is actually make a new process of the browser, so that each windows has its own process, giving the OS better management overall.

In the link you provided, indeed handbrake gave 37% speed gain, but note that iMac uses the i7 860, that 37percent is for the i7 870. Anyway, its roughly 26% ++. The point here, is that handbrake is designed for HT technology, that's why you are seeing the speed increase. So if your app isn't designed for HT, then it doesn't see the same increase, so its like a 100Mhz speed bump.

Moreover, like I said, Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's own solution for making apps multi threaded, basically all apps, will be multi-core aware. So its like the software implementation of HT only better, because its built in right into the OS.

So basically all apps that uses GCD Api's will make that app multi-core aware. Making the i5 and i7 almost equal, since its like squeezing every drop of what i5 chip.

In my humble opinion, I don't like HT at all, in some instances, its even slower than with HT off. HT was actually part of pentium 4 which is actually a failure (worst chip intel ever made), but it was removed when the multi cores are invented, now Intel brought back HT I don't know why
 
wikepedia definitely gives better explanation on Hyperthreading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_threading

Anyway what apple really did is made a better implementation so that the entire OS is multi-core aware. So even without HT, it'll give better management on multi threaded apps as well as multiple processes. :)
 
Actually price difference between the I5 and I7 is more than $200 when you factor in the sales tax the Apple Store charges. For me that would be 7% of $2,200 which is $154. So for me we're talking a $354 difference compared to getting the I5 version from various online retailers that don't charge sales tax. As far as I know you can't get BTOs anywhere except from Apple themselves. If you could I'd get the I7 for $2,200 as opposed to $2,354.

I'm not a photographer, professional video editor, or a hard core gamer (for the most part). I use my iMac for web surfing, occasional iLife projects, word processing (with MacSpeech Dictate), streaming internet video, and gaming (no Bootcamp and mostly less graphic-intensive games). So I have to wonder is $354 more for the I7 actually worth it for me? Clearly both the I5 and I7 would be overkill for me now but I'm thinking of future-proofing.

I should add that I have a family member who works for an online retailer and he claims he can get me his 30% employee discount (waiting on confirmation for this). No tax would be involved but they would charge for shipping. However, since he's visiting for the holidays he'd bring it with him in December, saving me the shipping cost. Once again though this would also be the stock I5 iMac but at $1,400 instead of $1,999 from someplace like Amazon or $2,354 for the I7 from Apple.

However until that is confirmed I'm looking at that $354 difference between the I5 and I7. Any thoughts on this?

-PN

it's 25% off (if he didn't already use it once otherwise 15%) and you gotta order it online or a retail store :)
 
...and reading everybody's comments it's actually overwhelming how many people got the Quad i7 as opposed to the Quad i5.


You've misread the signs, I think. The reason the i7 is seemingly being bought in greater quantities is that buyers have been ordering and spending money on it for weeks as it's only available from Apple as an online buy. So they've been talking excitedly about their purchase since placing those orders.
i5 buyers will most likely be getting theirs from Apple Stores, and so they haven't needed to order anything up till now and have only just started to buy in the last 24 hours or so.
i5 buyers will surely outnumber i7 buyers by a very big margin soon.
 
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