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What is better for visual studio build ? Dual Core CPU with HT and 3.0 ghz per core or quad core CPU with HT and 2.4 ghz per core ? Thank you. I consider buying a new laptop for development but I can not decide what cpu. I would like to know if its better high frequency or number of cores. SSD is certainty.

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It depends on the exact CPUs. Not all dual-core 3.0GHz CPUs with HT are the same. Also, there is no such thing as "3.0 GHz per core" -- you can't distribute a speed. If two cars are both going 50 miles per hour down the highway, that's not "50 MPH per car", it's just 50 MPH. – David Schwartz May 13 '12 at 10:58

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Over at Anadtech Bench you can find build times for building the Chromium project in Visual Studio 2010 with a bunch of different CPUs.

Drawing any overall conclusions is quite hard. It looks like build times scale well with core count, base clock speed, turbo speed, and architecture. At least up until around 15 min. After that it may be that the bottleneck moves somewhere else.

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Thank you. But this benchmark is for desktop CPU's. Not for laptops. – nørdic May 14 '12 at 21:01
There isn't be any great difference between desktop and laptop CPU's. The laptop CPU's are slower as a group but the architectures are the same so the effect of clock-speeds vs core count is the same. – Mr Alpha May 15 '12 at 5:11
Thank you.My search is over. I decided to Lenovo T420 with 128 gigabytes SSD Crucial M4 and 8 gigabytes of RAM, CPU with 2 cores / 4 threads 2.8 GHz with 3.5 GHz turbo. Thank you for your advice. – nørdic May 22 '12 at 6:44

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