title: Does quad-core perform substantially better than a dual-core for web development?
body: <p>First, I could not ask this on most hardware forums, because they are mostly populated by
  gamers.  Additionally, it is difficult to get an opinion from sysadmins, because they have a fairly different perspective as well.</p>
  
  <p>So perhaps, amongst developers, I might be able to deduce a realistic trend.  </p>
  
  <p>What I want to know is, if I regularly fire up netbeans/eclipse, mysql workbench, 3 to 5 browsers with multi-tabs, along with apache-php / mysql running in the background, perhaps gimp/adobe photoshop from time to time, does the quad core perform considerably faster than a dual core?  provided the assumption is that the quad has a slower i.e. clockspeed ~2.8  vs a 3.2 dual-core ?</p>
  
  <p>My only relevant experience is with the old core 2 duo 2.8 Ghz running on 4 Gig ram performed considerably slower than my new Core i5 quad core on 2.8 Ghz (desktops).  It is only one sample data, so I can't see if it hold true for everyone.</p>
  
  <p>The end purpose of all this is to help me decide on buying a new laptop ( 4 cores vs 2 cores have quite a difference, currently ).</p>