How much processor speed and cores do I need for these tasks?

Posted by ajay on Super User See other posts from Super User or by ajay
Published on 2009-12-23T06:08:46Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 23:23 UTC
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cpu

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speed

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memory

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product-rec

I am planning to buy a new laptop as I find my current one very slow. My question here is specifically related to RAM size and CPU power.

I will mostly be doing development (not much games). I would be dabbling in distributed computing, multithreaded and data intensive parallelizable tasks on multi-cores. For e.g. I would want to be able to Concurrent programming in Scala/Java/Clojure etc. and be able to see parallelization. Furthermore, I would want the RAM to be enough.

But from a developer machine standpoint, do you think 4GB RAM and 2.53GHz Dual Core processor would be enough.

I'm basically looking at this model:
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC118LL/A?mco=MTM3NDcyODk (link dead)

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