I'm currently shopping for a laptop and has my eyes set on the Thinkpad Carbon X1. I did a comparison between the current flagship model versus the flagship models from the past two years:
2014 Intel Core i7-4600U 1718 [0]
2015 Intel Core i7-5600U 1677 [1]
2016 Intel Core i7-6600U 1847 [2]
Two things stood out:
1. Single-thread performance actually decreased in 2015 for some bloody reason.
2. The single-thread performance of the 2016 flagship CPU is only 7.5% higher than the 2014 CPU, a negligible amount when it comes to purchasing decisions. Much of this improvement probably comes from the faster DDR4-2133 MHz RAM (vs DDR3-1600 MHz) rather than the CPU itself.
2014 Intel Core i7-4600U 1718 [0]
2015 Intel Core i7-5600U 1677 [1]
2016 Intel Core i7-6600U 1847 [2]
Two things stood out:
1. Single-thread performance actually decreased in 2015 for some bloody reason.
2. The single-thread performance of the 2016 flagship CPU is only 7.5% higher than the 2014 CPU, a negligible amount when it comes to purchasing decisions. Much of this improvement probably comes from the faster DDR4-2133 MHz RAM (vs DDR3-1600 MHz) rather than the CPU itself.
[0] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4600U+...
[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5600U+...
[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6600U...