Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Since I acquired my current laptop, I haven't needed to stay in the loop about every year's new line of Intel's Core i-series processors for laptops.

I don't know, and I hope this is incorrect, but I haven't been able to find a core i7 processor 5000 series and above thats a quad-core. It seems like Intel must have dropped raw performance power in favor of drastically increasing performance-per-watt efficiency. The 4th Gen i7 processors are twice as powerful as the 5th and 6th gens, but the 5th and 6th gens use up a third of the power. Or atleast that how I understand it currently, and would love it if any of you guys could tell me what is ACTUALLY up with the 5th and 6th gens.

Okay, so assuming the 4700's are more powerful than the 5500's and 6500's, How much do the GPU's matter?

Because I'm also finding that alot of newer laptop models with the 5th and 6th gen dual core i7's also come with Nvidia GTX960M 2GB dedicated graphics.
So given that the 4720HQ is more powerful than the 5500U or 6500U, it the GTX960M going to pick up the slack enough to where the difference of the the 4700 and the later power-sipping chips, to where you can't even tell a difference, will it out-perform because of the GPU, or is there Quad-core variants of the 5th and 6th gen processors I just haven't spotted yet?

Right now I'm seeing several gaming-ish laptops that have the GTX960M, with 4700-6500 for the processor.

I don't know where you've been shopping, but there are i7-6700HQ CPUs in use in most of the gaming laptops I see. You might have just been looking at the everyday laptops, and not ones meant for gaming.

I think you should generally avoid U-series processors (which are ultra-low voltage CPUs) and try to get a HQ series CPU

Does the 4720HQ laptop have a dedicated GPU?

The 5000 lineup was skipped by most gaming laptop manufacturers as far as i can tell. The new mainstream quadcore chip is the i7-6700HQ as KHg8m3r wrote. There is also a i7-6820HK which can be overclocked. Quite a few manufacturers also put some desktop chips in their laptops. Look at the gaming lineup from e.g. asus, msi, gigabyte and clevo resellers like sager.

You can't go wrong with the Dell "New" XPS 15 2015 refreshed with Skylake CPUs.