A good starting point: Students may learn on their own Mac, but will end up working on a PC.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=15402497&linkID=9242018
You only have 5 models to choose from on the Apple.com website with 8Gb or memory memory. All of the far exceed the duo-core processor requirements.
You may need to expand on what other information you require...
From the req. page:
For Inventor 2014 Mac® users
On Boot Camp®:
You can install Autodesk Inventor Professional software on a Mac computer on a Windows partition. The system must use Apple Boot Camp to manage a dual OS configuration and meet the minimum system requirements.
Mac Virtualization on Parallels Desktop:
I recommend installing bootcamp and inventor in bootcamp (it's a reboot partition..) Afterwards you can use parallels on MAC OSX to run your bootcamp partition but I do not recommend that.
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___________________________I kind of think you should be taking the graphics hardware ionto account too.
A dedicated solution will be much better than the poor Intel HD graphics.
In my opinion the I5 or I7 CPU´s are both fast enough to run Inventor at de-
cent speed. You probably will only notice a difference when you´re rendering
for visualisation because that´s when the I7´s Hyperthreading is to kick in.
Just make sure you cover the following:
8Gb+ Ram
Good single thread performance for the CPU
Dedicated graphics card
Hope this kind of helps you...
Best regards
Daniel