Amd for software development purpose

To be honest, the AMD A8 7410 slightly edges out over the Intel i3-4030. Based on this alone, I'd go with the AMD CPU. However, I think one of the most important questions that hasn't been asked yet is whether or not you intend to do any GPGPU programming. The reason I'm bringing this up is because Intel, for some stupid reason, decided to implement their OpenCL library in a non-conducive manner (i.e., it's not compatible with many other OpenCL libraries). On the other hand, AMD's APP SDK (formerly Stream) allows for low-level interface access -- this can be a bane or awesome, depending on just how much control you like to exercise on hardware manipulation.

If GPGPU doesn't matter, my question is, "why use Microsoft Visual Studio?" MS Visual Studio is very bloated out-of-box. However, that doesn't mean I'm saying Visual Studio is bad -- on the contrary, it's a very good and easy to use developer suite for Windows. Still, it requires quite a bit of tinkering to have a more acceptable memory/processing footprint. (For example, graphics diagnostics is Visual Studio kills any low-end computer.)

As you said you've used XAMPP, I'm wondering whether or not you used Visual Studio for PHP and Perl development. I don't think Visual Studio is apropos for Perl and PHP. That said, which programming languages are you working with? If you could tell me/us this, I'm sure I/we could give you a better recommendation for software development as well.