I'm almost ready to buy a Dell XPS 15 laptop for my job as a software engineer.
I work mostly with IntelliJ, Android Studio, Visual Studio, Database Services and some other tools.
I do not do 3D rendering or play games.
So my main question, should I get an i5 CPU or i7?
Do I really need the hyperthreading for the software I use?
My two choices are:
i7-6700HQ vs i5-6300HQ
The i5 6300HQ is a good CPU for the programs you use. However, it is definitely fair to say that with the more threads offered by the i7 6700HQ, performance, especially with programs that can utilise multiple threads, will be improved. The advantages of hyper threading are explained well here (Visual Studio is mentioned).
To summarize the link above:
Hyper threading is useful if you are using your machine for software development (as in your case) because current IDEs are optimised to take advantage of the multiple threads. This speeds up development. Visual Studio is a program that does this.
However, when it comes to executing the program that you are actually coding, hyper threading does not really help unless you are developing an application that takes advantage of multiple threads.
