CPU considerations

I'll be buying a laptop/convertible fairly soon and I wanted to ask you guys about real world performances. So far, I'm looking at the benchmarks such as PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End and the tradeoff seems to be between ultrabook dual core CPUs (Zenbook/Yoga) vs full laptop with a i7 QM.

Common QM's such as the 3630QM perform 2x as high on CPUMark as the ultrabook CPU's.

I'll be using mostly productivity software, no desire for discrete gfx, but I'm the type of guy who would pay extra for an extra couple second difference in MS Office or browser tasks. It's mainly the trade-off in portability that's got me thinking back and forth.

Those of you who've seen both CPU's, do you notice a big difference in real world, relatively mundane use cases?

 

Where you will see the difference is in compute intensive tasks like rendering 3D, compiling code, encoding video/audio, etc. And then usually it's the more cores that help than the speed, although faster is still beneficial, but two fast cores usually can't make up for a quad core at a slower clock speed in those tasks. As far as daily mundane work in Word, Excel, etc then you're better off going with the ULV CPU and investing in an SSD. That will make the system feel like it's ten times faster than with a traditional 5400RPM laptop hard drive. The difference is remarkable.

 

I've used CPUs from pretty much every modern category on Intel's lineup, and you should be fine with practically any processor offered on a modern notebook. Hell, even an older Core 2 Duo will work (as in the X61t in my sig). As HTWingNut said, CPU choice becomes important when you get into very CPU-intensive tasks, which "basic" users simply won't do.

If you want to open programs faster, read/write data faster, etc, you're looking not at CPUs but the storage system instead. Replace the HDD with a SSD and your computer will feel very, very "snappy" thanks to the stupidly-low random access times of a SSD when compared to any HDD.