When You Are Buying A Computer … Look Out For The Number of Cores

When You Are Buying A Computer … Look Out For The Number of Cores

After over three years, I finally gave up on my trusted 13 inch Macbook Pro. In the past I’ve used non-Mac products, and, by the end of the year, they were often missing keys, and where the whole computer felt like it had dropped off a table a few times. But with a trusted Macbook, it often feels as fresh as it was when you bought it. My Macbooks have never let me down, and there is nothing I missing in the things I need … which is basically to do my work.

Me and “it” have been through a good deal over the past few years, including Xmas lectures for schools, some serious R-PI integration [here], and keynote talks in different parts of the world, while being pounded with an ever increasing amount of code.

And so I decided to upgrade, as my coding has reached such a scale that I often need to be running lots of different operating systems and tools. My old Mac has a grand old total of … two cores … and 16GB (and running on an i7 processor).

At one time you might say … to paraphrase Bill Gates … “that’s enough for everything that you might ever need”. But as I increasingly pushed my two core system to the limit, with 8GBs shared across Mac OSX and Windows, and then running Visual Studio on Windows, I could virtually see my battery drain by the minute. As it drained, the computer heated up, and the fans went into overdrive. It was became almost unusable.

But Apple has done some smart work on their Macbook Pro, and one of the best models now supports 12 cores (and with 32GBs of memory):

This means that I can give my Ubuntu instance a couple of cores, and let the Windows instance have four, and then share the memory out. If you add in a solid GPU for your most strenuous of crypto cracking exercises, you have a computer that is fit for a security researcher.

My first ‘real’ computer had 1MB and my PhD was done on a computer with 16MB (yes, I did say 16 MB). To get 16MB into a computer involved inserting a large memory card into the I/O interface bus. I love this new development world that we have, and the ever increasing use of open source tools. It is a world which frees us from the x86 world of the past, and opens up a new world of data, and wherever there is data, there is memory and processing.

I remember, too, when 1MB was the limit, and then 16MB, and then 4GB, and then 16GB. Each time we stuck at these limits, and the often constrained what we did. Now, we see 32GB, in a laptop, and a whole new world of development awaits us.