Difference between new i5 and i7 CPU?

[southerndoc]

I don't believe it works quite like that. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but programs are designed to utilize so many cores. So if you have three programs all running that are designed to utilize 4 cores, the work load will be spread out among those four cores with each program taking a little bit of each of the four. I believe the same goes for ones that utilize two cores, etc. If you have a four core machine and the program can only use two, two will be used, and the other two ignored. I believe then that controller within the mac or OSX is what then decides what cores to send the programs too. But that is all beyond my understanding.

I realize most of the programs I use are single-core programs, but will OS X allocate programs to different cores?

I think I may spring for the i7 2.9 GHz anyhow since the turbo boost goes to 3.6 GHz.