Gaming Future laptop question

[Harsky]

At the moment, my 4 year old core2duo Dell laptop is starting to show a little strain when I'm doing multitasking stuff so I figured now's a good time to buy a new laptop. More specifically, one with a core i5 processor but my question is this. Is there any news on any new processors coming out this year?

 

[marcus134]

new processors are coming out every years. so yeah you can wait for those who will come out this year in hope of getting a better performance per dollar ratio, but you could also wait for those who will come out the year after this year to get an even better performance per dollar ratio, and etc.

seriously, they should become available in april, so you can expect a plethora of laptops sporting the new Ivy Bridge cpu for this summer, and you can expect a lot of manufacturer that will try to monetize on the confusion since they will still be called core i3/i5/i7 and sports roughly the same feature.

I don't think the performance leap will be huge as this is just an iteration of the sandy brige microarchitecture. However it is believed that the power consumption will be considerably lower which may translate by either longer battery lifetime or laptop built with cheaper battery.
The second point of interest may be the new igp.

 

[Originality]

Some sources say April for Ivy Bridge, some say August. I've even heard they're shipping on April and will arrive in stores in August. Either way, they're only a few months away. It will take a couple months more for them to start appearing in laptops in stores, since stores don't update their stock straight away.

CPU will get a 20% performance boost, Intel HD 4000 gets a 30% boost. Respectable, but not worth upgrading if you're already on Sandy Bridge. What may be interesting is seeing the increased battery performance it gives considering it's a die shrink.

 

[Harsky]

So it looks like the only reason to upgrade is better battery life? Battery longevity isn't of any concern for me because my laptop is always plugged into a power socket anyways.

 

[Originality]

What you can do to give your laptop new life, give it a SSD. It'd be cheaper than a brand new Ivy Bridge laptop.
EDIT: That and probably reinstall Windows to get rid of half the junk and bloatware that slows laptops down.

 

[CCNaru]

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