Haswell, Broadwell, Ivy Bridge. Dual Core, Quad Core, Turbo Boost. Mobile, i5, i7. There are so many different terms used to describe the processor in the current crop of Macs that trying to figure out which is best for you is enough to make your head spin. So which processor should you choose? And does it really matter?

Modern micro-processors are incredibly complex beasts, housing more than a billion transistors, each about 0.02% of the thickness of a human hair. And they do far more than the CPUs of old; those took inputs, executed instructions on them, and passed the output to memory. Today’s processors are mini-computers, incorporating multiple cores, or CPUs, on one chip, alongside short-term memory, or cache, and even graphics processors.

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