There were only small improvement to ipc going from first gen i7s/i5s/i3s to sandy, and then again to ivy(what your cpu is based on). To give you an example: when the first core i7s launched, the lowest end $285 2.66ghz core i7 920 hyper threaded quad core had similar performance to the previous top of the line $1399 core 2 quad extreme 9770 at 3.2ghz(I think the i7 performed that well even if you turned off hyper threading). all that happened in the move from 45nm core 2 products to the first gen of core i7 and core i5 products(also 45nm and carried on to 32nm in core i3 and core 7 hexacore). That is due in large part to 1: the move to smaller, faster L2 cache per core(vs a large shared L2 cache) and the addition of a large shared 元 Cache and 2: to integration of the memory controller onto the cpu to reduce latency(it was previously part of the motherboard chipset and ran at much lower speed). It has higher instructions per clock than core 2 duo. Your new laptop has a core i5 3210M which is a hyper threaded dual core with turbo.
