Number of cores and threads

Hardware is fine, it is the software, that has to take advantage of more threads and cores.
Safari will not be snappier on an eight or twelve core machine anyway.

What applications do you normally use?

Most often, four cores is enough for most, but sometimes the extra cores in a well programmed application can give that a severe boost.

I currently work on video and audio, simple stuff, and during exporting I would like to have many, many more cores to shave some minutes off the wait, but during everything else my four core i7 will hardly gasp.

 

Two things you need to realise: 1. If you have eight cores, and four apps that each cannot use more than two cores, then you can run all four and they will happily use all eight cores. 2. The clock speeds you read are for the case that all cores are running. All cores running produces more heat which reduces clock speed. So that 8 core machine that you think is slower because the official clock speed is lower, will run four cores at the exact same machine as the four core machine.