i7 doesn't tell you anything useful for comparison with Zen. Ask more about if you should wait for Zen or buy Skylake. Or if you should wait for Zen or Kaby Lake or Cannonlake.
i7 just says you're going to get the top of the performance (and price) list for a desktop/mobile processor.
Nobody knows if Zen will actually live up to expectations yet, so I would wait until reviews and benchmarks come out, and base your decision on that. I made the mistake of ordering a Bulldozer CPU as soon as they came out.
Wait. It should be a good chip performance wise, and great value for the money, too. Also, the more we put pressure on Intel, the better it is for everyone in the long term.
This. Waiting will mean you have a choice of architectures and it is looking like this architecture may pull the Intel prices down too. Used to be Intel's top of the line desktop CPUs were all under $1k because of the amd competition. You can make a better price/power/performance decision with the new competition. At least I hope it is new competition. Unless you need more compute immediately I would wait. Intel's improvements price and performance wise have been lackluster the last couple of years since they are well ahead of AMD. Competition can only improve things.
Depends on what you have and how urgently you need the greater speed.
My main system is still running a i7-2600 from over 5 years ago. That GTX 680 I have in there is still plenty fast. The upgrade question is: how pretty do I want Star Citizen to be?
I'm still rocking an i5-2500 from the same generation.
It is still completely fine for everything I ask of it even against the much newer machine at work, with the upgrade to an SSD a while back it basically felt like a new machine.
I upgraded from a i5-2400 to a second-hand i7-3770K around a year ago given they're socket compatible: the difference between them is larger than the difference between the i7-3770K and the i7-6700K, from what I saw looking at benchmarks when I did this. There's certainly workloads where there's a noticeable different in performance.
I have an i5-3570K in the work desktop, I really don't notice that much difference though the i7-3770K was/is a beast in comparison, for my workloads I just don't see much benefit in the i7's, I'll likely get another i5, all the ones I've had have been excellent on the $/perf scale going back 5 years or so.
I would like to build a PC that would compile stuff quickly... Android, Java, Spring/Hibernate, some Rust and JS recently. Currently takes a few minutes to build any of my projects on a laptop I have. I think more physical cores will boost it more?
First question, does that laptop have a SSD? Most developer machines do these days, that's the single biggest improvement to build times you can make. Then look at CPU, IO, memory utilization during builds to see where improvements can be had.
Is that an NVME SSD or SATA SSD? NVME is about 4 times faster than SATA in terms of pure transfer bandwidth, though I'm not sure about random access speeds.
Well. it was the fastest when I bought it 3 years ago, it's SATA. I'm not buying another one, it would be wast of money, better get proper CPU and mobo.
NVMe makes sense only if you are either pushing bandwidth limits (e.g. processing large RAW 14-bit 4K/8K video on a scratch drive) or have hundreds of threads with concurrent I/O operations. In real world, you are barely going to notice any difference between SATA2 and SATA3 SSDs, not to mention M.2 PCIe ones.
Generally speaking... "productivity" and media styles of workloads do better with more cores/high memory machines. Gaming typically does better with higher clock speeds (which means less cores in every case I've seen). If you want that in a laptop form factor though, I am not aware of Intel sticking massive-cored chips in the mobile form factor, so your choices will be limited to whatever the fastest i7 is you can pickup... unless you were thinking of building a desktop?
UPDATE - Oh mutagen's point about SSD is absolutely spot on... the faster the storage the better _first_... then worry about the rest of that stuff I mentioned.
I decided to wait for Zen months ago. I sure hope its worth it. My plan is zen beast for vr gamedev/play (on linux, not windows) Cant VR without the computer to support it, and 90fps keeps the VR discomfort away.
Wait for Zen, but evaluate benchmarks. You can probably still get a cheaper Intel then even if amd doesn't live up to the hype (because at least amd will be closer).
i7 just says you're going to get the top of the performance (and price) list for a desktop/mobile processor.