I am thinking how to buy a ThinkPad on a budget and it may come with only 2 i5 processor cores, but with 480GB or 980GB SSDs. Is 2 core (with 8GB RAM) enough for beginner-to-intermediate programming?<p>(How) Can an additional processor core be emulated on a free SSD space if more computational power is needed (similar to a swap partition for RAM)?<p>When I was curious about defi, I remember there was a cryptocurrency ~chia, which used hard disks for computing/hashing, but this wears them out quicker. I'd like to have some type of CPU core emulation on an SSD to turn on temporarily if using some compute intensive ML etc (given that compute time may not be of top priority).
Okay you're bringing up a whole lot of things here.<p>To address your main question: no.<p>Now to address the rest of what you say:<p>What's your budget for a ThinkPad? Why do you want a ThinkPad in particular? Saying an i5 processor is meaningless. What model? Like i5-10210U. That seems like a really big SSD for a laptop that would be of the era to still only have two cores and 8 gigs of RAM. Yes that could be enough power for beginner to intermediate programming.<p>Additional processor cores can't be emulated on storage. The only reason storage could be used as swap is because there is no difference between storage and RAM except one is volatile and the other one isn't. A processor isn't storage although it has storage on it in registers and cache.<p>You're getting way ahead of yourself with the third paragraph there and I suggest that you go and relearn the fundamentals of how computers work before you even approach any of this next stuff.
> Is 2 core (with 8GB RAM) enough for beginner-to-intermediate programming?<p>Yes, that’s perfectly adequate.<p>> Can an additional processor core be emulated on a free SSD space if more computational power is needed (similar to a swap partition for RAM)?<p>No, that’s not really possible. You’ve misunderstood Chia, they don’t perform actual computation on HDDs.
Emulating a processor core doesn't normally take a lot of memory, but involves a lot of computation, so it's faster to do it on your CPU without involving the SSD. I guess you may be asking if there is a space/time tradeoff that could be made.<p>I guess you could imagine caching stretches of execution which would have the exact inputs and CPU state, a bit like the RR tool does... But would still be hard to overcome the SSD overhead in addition to the CPU running the emulation and caching logic and performing all the required SSD I/O. Interesting idea still.
In general no, but specific cases yes. See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table</a>