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Does Hyperthreading Help For Computer Science?

Brehohn
By Brehohn
in CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory
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This is going to be my college degree in the future. I will be starting college this fall. Will having an i7 be a better choice for Computer Science because of Hyperthreading? Or is the i5 4670K perfectly fine?

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What do you mean by computer science? Like, solidworks, matlab, autocad and all those fun things? Yea, an i7 will be better, but unless you are doing pretty high level stuff, an i5 would be fine. My roomate has been designing his brains out in solidworks this quarter, and his i5 3570k and 7870 GPU have been nothing but amazing for him. So yea, it might be better to get a 4770k over a 4670k, but honestly either is just fine.

 

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The i7 will only pull ahead in intensive situations that use all eight threads. In all other cases the i5 will be identical and in a few cases even a bit better since hyperthreading can get in the way of some things. When it does help you will typically see around a %30 speedup. So you have to decide if you do heavily threaded tasks enough for such a speedup to be worth $100.

 

I would say that if you are unsure it would be a safe bet to save the $100 and spend it elsewhere. Such as getting an SSD (or a bigger one) or more ram, or even a better cooler and overclocking the snot out of an i5 and you will still get the peak performance of an i7. I'm happy with my i7-2600k, but I may have also been happier with a better GPU or a bigger SSD, or more ram I guess. You get the idea.

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This is going to be my college degree in the future. I will be starting college this fall. Will having an i7 be a better choice for Computer Science because of Hyperthreading? Or is the i5 4670K perfectly fine?

 

Not really, not during the beginning stages of your degree. All you'll be doing is writing software and that sort of stuff. 

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in any kind of cad program or simulation software it can definitely help. If you are just going to mostly be programing you probably wont notice any benefits from it though. I would still go for an i7 though as it is just better in every way.

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Not really, not during the beginning stages of your degree. All you'll be doing is writing software and that sort of stuff.

^ I don't see why you'd need anything more than a modern Pentium.

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Computer Science....you're going to be doing Java, C, and C++ programming for a long period of time.

Unless you write your code to use multiple cores and/or multiple threads, it's going to use one core.

 

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i7 would be nice :) but it usually doesnt take too much power to run simple program, unless you are doing some crazy stuff. I've threaded stuff on a Raspberry Pi before and it still ran fine.

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