New Machine

I’ve been using a C2D MacBook for a while now as my dev machine, and I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a 27" iMac quad core with the i5 processor.  I’m still in the process of migrating my old files over, but so far I am very impressed.  The screen is simply amazing. Lots of room to spread out on, and I still have my second, albeit smaller, 20" monitor as well.

As for i5 vs i7, I went with the i5 because I could get it now vs having to wait 3-4 weeks to get an i7.  The other reason for the i5 is that the processor is socketed in the iMac, which means that I could upgrade the CPU at a later time when I feel it’s necessary.  The big differences between the i5 and the i7 are that the i7 is clocked slightly faster (2.8GHz vs 2.66GHz) and that the i7 supports Hyperthreading while it’s disabled on the i5.  Other than that, they are identical.

EDIT: While waiting for my data to transfer, I’ve been catching up with some videos on YouTube.  I noticed that the CPU usage for Flash is about 50% for a single core, while leaving the entire machine about 80% idle overall.  Simply amazing.  This would’ve pegged an entire core on the MacBook.  This machine is not even breaking a sweat.

Dec 03, 2009