I've read the old comments here and elsewhere but can't get a sense for how important these are for a Windows laptop that would primarily be used for DPI 15 in several Chrome browser tabs and Quickbooks. Would a dual core machine lag noticeably?

I read that the new eighth generation i5 chips now have hyperthreading.  Does that make much of a difference for DPI?

Thanks.

We are not computer experts but from our point of view, quad cores are only noticeably faster for power users who are running a lot of applications. Having said that, quad cores have other advantages and the price difference between an i5 dual core and i7 quad core are often not that much more. Because we make our living on our computer, we typically go with a top-of-the-line machine. It takes about 15 Gb of RAM just to launch Windows (with all the programs we may need) which presumably makes us power users but we have been running our current computer for 5 years without notable issues or a corrupted user profile. We leave our computer running for one week at a time and only hibernate between daily use. We suspect we owe our computer stability  success to M-Tech (231) 547-5562 who we asked to build us the best computer and we believe they nailed our request. Keep in mind that there are a lot of possible bottlenecks. We requested the best motherboard, best RAM etc. because we typically push the envelope and minimally have had to previously replace our computer every 2 - 3 years (working about 60 hours per week). We don't get paid to make this endorsement and while we could just be lucky, we believe M-Tech had more to do with our computers durability than luck.

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I've ran DPI 15 on an i3 12GB machine, a quadcore i7 16gb gaming beast, and now a Surface Laptop i5 8gb. The i7 quad and i5 dual perform similarly, but like Lunis said, there are advantages to the i7 quad over i7 dual and i5 dual for power users who have a lot of things running in the background. I now primarily use my i5 8gb machine and it runs everything well with 5 virtual desktops running at all times.