A few years ago my X220t with i7 CPU was finally tortured beyond endurance, so I went around and checked how I could get a decent laptop for compiling stuff. A

A few years ago my X220t with i7 CPU was finally tortured beyond endurance, so I went around and checked how I could get a decent laptop for compiling stuff. At that point, I was mostly single threaded CPU bound. It turns out that i7 had still a very good performance comparable to most laptops. E.g. thinkwiki says its an i7-2640M , in an X220T laptop from 2011. Passmark gives it a single threaded rating of 1516. The current best CPU I can see in a thinkpad with a quick lookup is a i7-1185G7, with a single threaded rating of 2843. That's almost double, but we're comparing with a system of 12 years ago. Laptops have become a lot more power efficient, GPUs, multi core USB and WIFI are better. But the i386 days where you could more than double your CPU performance after 1.5 years are clearly over. That x220, if upgraded with SSD and 16GB ram and a new battery still does quite well today, and I paid about €500 for it over its whole lifetime.