my laptop (my main development machine) is now 7 years old - time for a new one.
the processor is a quad-core intel i5-3230: 2.6GHz "normal" speed, and 3.2GHz "boost" - performance-wise, it is fine.
One with the same complement of RAM, SSD, etc has a quad-core i7-1065G7 with 1.3GHz "normal" speed, and 3.9GHz "boost" - so that's half the "normal" speed, but a tad faster "boost"
This seems to be quite common with comparable current offerings.
So the question: is this much slower "normal" speed likely to be an issue in practice?