[Guest]

The Sandy Bridge series definitely are "killer CPUs" but I would hesitate to recommend quadcores for notebooks. The quads do incredibly well in benchmark tests but what do you gain in real use? Quads draw more power than their 2-core relatives, which translates into shortened battery life and increased fan noise. In addition, when looking at the current Macbook Pro line even the "slowest" Sandy Bridge i5 2-core CPU (2.3 GHz) is significantly faster "per core" than the ultra high-end 2.3 GHz i7 quad. Hence, unless one has really frequent demand for the number crunching power only quads can deliver, one would be mostly better off with 2 cores.