And here I was entertaining the idea of doing just that, swapping out my 3570k with the Core i7 equivalent. Damn. Now you're telling me that it would be useless to do so and that it would be simply wasting money. Damn.
And here I was thinking that more cores (or threads) would be better since well, let's face it, the multitasking load that we have now is much heavier than we had years ago. For instance, years ago most web browsers were single process affairs whereas today they are multi-process beasts chowing down on CPU cycles. Google Chrome is an example of said multi-process beasts. I have 11 Google Chrome tabs open in my browser right now with 24 Google Chrome sub-processes. Each time a process has to be swapped out and another swapped into the CPU you incur a performance penalty because it has to do a context switch which involves everything from flushing the cache, loading the cache with new data and priming the pipeline with new executable code, and then finally executing it. You lose performance when your processor does this and with as many processes and threads we have running on our systems today as versus just four years ago I have to wonder how much of a performance hit we're seeing because of it.
More cores and/or threads, even four more, could reduce the amount of context switching that a processor core has to do by 50%.