One comes with i5 7200U

The other comes with A12 9700P

Both come with 1TB HDD / 8GB RAM

I do not play games.

I plan to receive training to become a security expert, and I am going to run a virtual computer ( VM Ware and/or VirtualBox ) to test vulnerabilities

I do other normal things such as office software, YouTube, watching movies.

Are they the same brand/model of laptop, the only difference is the CPU? All other things being equal, I would choose the Intel i5 7200U over the A12 9700P, because it has better benchmarks for most common tasks.

However, when I am laptop shopping, I prioritize: Brand reliability, screen quality, keyboard comfort, and battery life.

Therefore, personally, I would accept the slightly worse performance of the A12, if I liked the ergonomics of the laptop better than the i5 laptop.

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If you don't play games, edit videos, or do CAD, then both those processors are really overkill for Linux. I'd choose on the basis of reliability and batteries
https://www.squaretrade.com/laptop-reliability-1109
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/a...ting-notebooks

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The i5 7200U is a better CPU, but it only has 2 true cores. The A12 9700P has 4 true cores, which may be better for running VMs. But since you're only going to be running one VM (from the sounds of it), maybe this won't matter.

One thing to keep in mind is that a 1TB spinning hard drive may be a performance bottleneck. I'd personally go with an SSD rather than a 1TB HDD. But another possibility that may be cheaper than an SSD is a fast USB3.0 thumbdrive. Some of them can be on sale for very cheap (like $10-$15), and yet are still pretty fast. Look for reviews to confirm the speed of a USB3.0 thumbdrive, though - you want at least 100MB/sec read speed.

While even a fast USB3.0 thumbdrive won't be as fast as an SSD, it will still be much better than a spinning 1TB HDD when it comes to file access for your OS and VM. That gives you fast speed for your OS and VM, while keeping a large capacity 1TB drive for large snapshots, images, backups, etc.

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If you don't play games, the i5 7200U is better. The A12 is a superior gaming cpu (since the integrated GPU is SOOOOOOOOOO much better thant the i5's), but the CPU itself is FAR, FAR, FAR weaker.

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Truly excellent answers here. I have made up my mind. I am going for Intel i5 + SSD because I do not play games.

A lot of higher end (> $300 laptops) let you swap out the HDD, so kind of moot for the SSD. The i5 is a dual core, the A12 is a quad core. About the only argument that favors the i5 is battery life, since two less cores plus an SSD draws a lot less power out of the box.

i5 7200U - 2.5GHz dual core - 4700 score on cpubenchmark

A12 9700P - 2.5GHz quad core - 3805 score on cpubenchmark

Not sure why the scores don't favor the quad core with a better GPU (tested on windows?). But the i5 came out 6 months after the A12. Q4 2016 versus Q2 2016. And odds are good that the budget option (a12) ships with slower RAM.

IPC. The Intel has something like 80% better IPC than the pre-zen cored AMD cpu's. My desktop has an 8 core AMD, and the high end dual-core hyperthreaded (4 threaded) Intel CPU's are faster than it even in threaded tasks. Plain and simple, if it's not zen core, Intel will demolish AMD cpu's even with fewer cores and slower actual CPU speed.

You're still paying 2x's the price for 1/2 the paper specs. I like my a10 9600p with 8gb ram which only cost me $280 (sale price). And oddly scores 3804 on cpubenchmark in spite of it's 2.4GHz quad core and R5 gpu.

Well yeah, cpubenchmark ONLY does CPU. The A12 previously mentioned and your A10 have basically identical processors, only the integrated GPU is different, so they should get nearly identical scores.

The last (and only) intel laptop I had wouldn't allow me to run 64bit virtual machines. Nothing but AMD for me after that.

Just for completeness, the A12 is not a true 4-core, it is based on AMD's Bulldozer design and with that it is a 2-module design, where you have 2 integer unit and 1 floating point unit per module.
Given the higher IPC of the Intel CPU, if your workload involves processing floating point numbers or needs high single thread performance you would go for the Intel CPU every time.