My current computer is less than a year old and is showing signs that the motherboard has a defect or something. I am not 100% sure at the time but that is not in scope of the question.
Basically I am wanting to replace my current system with another system (CPU, Memory and Board).
Right now I have a socket 2011 board with an i7 3820 chip and 32GB of ram (ram was cheap!).
I am thinking about moving to an AMD FX 3850 Vishera chip.
The issue I am running into is trying to understand if and what I am loosing or gaining if I move to AMD from Intel or vise versa.
For example:
My Intel i7 3820 is a Quad Core CPU with Hyperthreading. To the best of my understanding hyperthreading is a thread execution optimization. Meaning the CPU decieds which order queued thread should be executed in to achieve the best performance. Is this right?
What trips me up is the fact that the CPU only has 4 cores but yet it registers in Windows / Linux as 8 cores. But it only has 4 CORES? How can this be?
The chip I thinking about buying is an 8 Core CPU with 8 physical cores but I am thinking if it is anything like the previous chip (The FX 8150) it will have 8 Integer processors and only 4 floating point processors shared between pairs of cores.
So how does one make sense of which chip is dare I say better? No that does not sound right. How does one figure out which chip would serve their purpose better?
Basically I am looking to use the machine for Beginner Java development, heavy on VMware Workstation (up to 5 machines at once), and various gaming titles ranging from hardcore FPS to minecraft.
Gaming aside because that focuses more on the GPU. Does 8 real cores really beat the hyperthreading on intel? From a VMware perspective does 8 real cores make a difference?
Can anyone lend me some insight to how or where one can find information to make a decision for something like this. I am more trying figure out the differences between the CPU. Do not consider motherboards or memory into this.