Justifying upgrade

I currently have a laptop with processor (A) below. I’m looking to purchase a new laptop with processor (B) below. (Both are HP laptops)

(A) Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.50 GHz 2.50 GHz 6MB L2 Cache

(B) Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-720QM Quad Core processor (1.6GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 GHz

So:

2 x 2.5 = 5.0
4 x 1.6 = 6.4

(5 / 6.4) – 1 = 22% faster

[I’m ignoring the Turbo boost because it sounds like a gimmicky marketing tactic]

Is the above equation generally true or significantly false? If false, can someone point me to a website to explain the difference?

The reason I ask is that I have this thing with new computer purchases in which I require At least a 2x improvement in every category. In the lap top I’m looking at, my hard drive size more than doubles, my video card doubles, ram limit more than doubles but the processor improvement is looking like a piddly 22% improvement. Thus not justifying the purchase.

I ask here because CoX is about the most intensive thing that I do.

Thanks in advance for any input.

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C) Tough to say.

It's always an iffy proposition to compare a faster dual core with a slower quad core.

On one hand benchmarks that scale to the number of cores almost always perform better when their are more cores present. You need a very large difference in clock speed to not be faster. On the other if a benchmark is only single or dual core, then the slower quad will lose.

Intel's Turbo Boost mode isn't just hype. On one hand it fixes the problem in the previous paragraph. When only one or two cores are being used, the i7-720QM will be clocked faster than their 1.6GHz default speed. A single core to 2.8GHz, two cores to 2.4GHz and even three and four cores to 1.73GHz if power use and temps are within limits.

So here are some benchmarks.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/lap...-benchmarked/2

Passmark
T9300 - 1664
i7-720QM - 3230

Not as many articles comparing laptop CPUs.

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