If you are in the mood for some really big performance charts drop by InsideHW for comparisons of just about every x86/64 processor on the market currently.  Covering Athlon II and Phenom II, Celerons, i3, 5 and 7 as well as some Pentium chips you can see how they all match up.  To sum up the article InsideHW breaks up the results they saw by a number of common uses for PCs, from gaming to surfing and Facebook and they offer a top contender in each category.

“Do you remember the times when CPUs were chosen based on whether you were assembling a gaming PC, in which case you’d opt for cheaper Celerons and Durons, or a heavy workload PC, in which case you’d buy the more expensive Pentiums and Athlons? It came to our mind on multiple occasions during this test. Those days of single-core CPUs, when Megahertz were the only relevant thing, and the difference between home and professional models consisted in the difference in the quantity of cache memory, only served to underline the problems that modern-day users are facing when assembling a new PC…”

Here are some more Processor articles from around the web:

Click Here to go to Processors  Processors