I have had the same question. However, in my experience, the cpu speed is a huge factor. I think the graphic cards comes next and then the amount of RAM (memory) . More RAM allows you to open more sketches but definitely cpu speed.

yeah and I am really wondring if 2core or quad core would be beneficial for processing sketch or it's better to go only with single processor with maximum mhz... 

I think it's worth going multi-core. We've done a few sketches that use threads (see Shiffman's simple example here: http://www.shiffman.net/teaching/a2z/threads/) and the experience has been very good. It depends on what you are going to do of course.

In general, my experience has been that my own stuff is always CPU limited - but I have not tried to handle large data sets with Processing yet.

Andreas

Over two cores is unlikely to help, because most of the time, a single core is being maxed out to run the code. The other core gets used by the OS to do housekeeping so that things don't completely slow to a crawl, and if you have anything else running on a thread (e.g. a loader thread or something doing other computation), that will be moved to the other core as well.

But unless you're doing a lot of work with additional threads (not common with interactive graphics), you're significantly better off taking higher CPU speed over additional cores.

This is going to depend on what your programming.  If you write your code to utilize the GPU (vbo's, display lists, textures, glsl, etc), then a high powered GPU can become much more important than the CPU.  If your doing normal stuff, then most of the work is on the CPU.  Memory will all depend on what your loading in - it can be little or a lot, that all depends on you.  The core of Processing itself doesn't consume much memory, but if you load in pictures, different fonts, and lots of data.. then you have to deal with that like any program.

Thanks all 

has any one run Processing on Boards such as beagle bone ? Kinect works very well on processing but my application requires mounting kinect on a small system where i cannot use PC or laptop. Also does the shell script files generated in processing in Ubuntu work on linux Arm ?