Laptop purchase advice

[BrianRunsPhilly]

I'm a scientist who does computational work. Right now I have a Sony Vaio Z series, 13" screen with a i7-3612QM processor. It's fast and light, but the build quality is terrible and its falling apart after a year and a half.
Use is mainly calculations, and some data visualization.
I want something with the weight of an ultrabook, but ideally quad -core.
It will be dual boot, Linux and Windows.
Budget is not important. Figure this will be in the $2k range.
13" screen.
256-512GB SSD
Minimum 8gb RAM
A good trackpad is important. The Sony one is not very good.

 

[verma1891]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231499

 

[BrianRunsPhilly]

That CPU is significantly slower than the one in my current computer. The U series is always going to be slower than a QM series, since it has 2 fewer cores.

 

[Deleted member 489584]

Hello!

I am a software engineer with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I have a few specific questions to you that will affect the price of my suggestion(s) to you.

Have you ever written numerical methods and/or computations directly against a graphics processing unit(GPU)? If this kind of performance gain is relevant to your work, consider choosing an Ultrabook with a dedicated GPU.

When writing code, do you employ multithreading?

If the answer to one or both of my above questions was yes, consider this as a suggestion:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230672

If no to one or both:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230669

Hope this helps. May all your splines be within acceptable tolerances!

 

[BrianRunsPhilly]

Hi there, and thanks for your help. No, I actually do a lot more scripting in perl and python than actual coding. The really serious work is done on our cluster or using Amazon EC2. None of my software uses GPU for calculations, but nearly all of it is multithreaded.

 

[verma1891]

That CPU is significantly slower than the one in my current computer. The U series is always going to be slower than a QM series, since it has 2 fewer cores.

Really sorry, I posted the wrong one. The problem is you cant find high end processing power in 13 inch laptops. What I mean to say is you should look into 15.6 inches to get sheer processing power. Infact your current processor is quite powerful and your upgrade wont be of much significance.

 

[verma1891]

BTW Why aren't you interested in a desktop? A liquid cooled 4960x or the higher end xeons can do wonders for you!!