P6100 to I7 , what difference would I see

[vilasman]

I know this seems like a stupid question, but I have never really had a truly fast computer. I am going to upgrade my processor. I don't know which processor i will get but I am looking at i3, i5 and i7 and the decision will be in part based on how much money I have available when I decide to pull the trigger.
It maybe as late as july before I buy, because I will either upgrade my ram from 4G to 8G or I will buy a second laptop which will either be a low to mid spec HP G72 or a low spec HP Envy 17. I am considering the Envy because I want the 2nd hard drive bay.
Now here's the question. I have a P6100. My wife plays lots of time management games. Games where you have to get a certain amount of whatever in the minimum time to move on to the next level. Eventually I will put adobe creative suite into one of these computers.
From what I can tell... going to the i3 my clock speed is going to go up a bit. Going from the 6100 to a quad core i5 I will see some speed difference over the i3 but where it really whips is if I have a multi core application. For the i7... the i7 may actually be slower than the i5 when it comes to clock speed... but it trumps it if you can use all of the cores.... and believe the i7 mobile has virtual cores and that will make it even faster.
Is this a pretty good summary of how this would go?

[gshv]

This is what you'll get from different Core ix families:

Core i3 will give you higher clock speeds, and extra 10% - 20% performance in multi-threaded tasks due to HyperThreading.

Core i5 will add Turbo Boost on top of that. That's an extra boost if your CPU is running within its power and thermal limits, i.e. if you have good thermal solution.

Core i7-6xx is a Core i5 with possibly higher core frequency.

Other Core i7 processors add two cores. Their stock frequency is lower than on the dual-cores, but they may compensate it using Turbo boost feature, i.e. they will run at higher, than stock, frequencies, especially for single and dual-threaded tasks.

Gennadiy

[Guest]

One other question.... when it comes to processor temperature... how can i tell before I buy a processor whether the cooling system in my computer can handle the temp of the processor?

Well 2 more questions...
There is no reason why I can't take a mobile processor and build a desktop computer around it... as long as I get the right mother board...correct?

[Guest]

So... I hope you dont mind me asking questions....
Practically speaking, a fast i5 processor will give the fastest usable results for most software, given that most software is not written for multi core processors. Is that a correct conclusion?

2nd. Within a given family of processors, be it i3,i5 or i7 there is a choice 2-5 processors each one at a different clock speed. Is the only factor that one would use to determine which clock speed to get within a given family, the speed of the processor vs the cost of the processor?

3rd. Does the next generation of intel i series processors use the same socket as the current series of processors?

and lastly.... what do you do with outdated processors... I mean you can take old hard drives and make external drives out of them, dvd drives and such can be put to good use.... but what do you do with old processors?