In the context of engineering studies: How many cores should a laptop processor have?

I'm looking forward to your answers on how much GB RAM / how fast a CPU should be, which processors you prefer

Engineers, gamers, and all other respondents are welcome.

Are you sure you study mechanical engineering?

If you do not know, the core number is irrelevant if no core performance was specified or selected in mechanical engineering only by core number, no matter which architecture behind it?

Yes. I'm very interested in different opinions, therefore the survey.

I use a simple laptop for citations. For CAD etc. I use a powerful desktop PC.

So the study itself does not need any kernels.

If you want to use tools like AutoCAD, you can check the system requirements:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirements-for-AutoCAD-2019-including-Specialized-Toolsets.html

The highest system requirements among all the programs you want to use will determine the system requirements your system must meet.

Gladly said: "Much helps a lot, the more cores the better."

This is of course nonsense. Many applications do not benefit from multiple cores simply because they have not been programmed. This leads to the fact that computers have very many cores, but really used then exactly one for the application. The other cores get bored with operating system and other side-scenes. Would not be bad, but often many cores have the disadvantage that the maximum clock is lower than comparable CPUs with fewer cores. In the end, the application runs slower than on the system with fewer cores.

Look at exactly what system requirements are made. It should be multi-core system. You want real parallelism alone for your OS. The number of cores is often not that important.

The "much helps a lot" you can often see the work memory. People are chewing 32GB in their boxes and never checking if these 32GB are even used in the beginning. In many cases it would have been smarter to use a stronger CPU and less memory.

On the subject of programming:

Look at what requirements the IDEs have. Knowing at the beginning of your studies which programs you will write yourself and what they will need is a bit difficult. Do you really think that you need more power than standard software? Also depends on how well your programs are optimized.

Otherwise, there should always be the opportunity to use pool rooms with appropriate computers at the university. The super blatant machine learning story, which you probably will not implement, you do not want to run anyway on a laptop.

Greetings and good luck studying (on the computer it will not fail, I'm pretty sure)

4 cores with 8 threads is actually so the minumum so general, in my opinion, if you want good performance. But as always, more is always better. However, one should value a good single core performance. Some programs can only use one core.

Minimum 4 cores, therefore, I would take 6-8 cores for the future all about it is not really in laptops, by the way, except for bad cooling power losses, etc. In addition, most games can use 4 cores and if you have r4 cores then the reserve is equal to who what Run in the background then bad luck had so 6 cores better 8