I'm not debating the number of IP connectiosn being made. I'm saying a modern day i7 will certainly load pages quicker then a C2D. Heck, you can even see a difference in load times when people do video comparisons from one smartphone to the next newest smart phone, so please don't tell me there isn't one, because that's nothing short of wrong.
With pages that have a lot of necessary javascript, there can be pretty hefty differences (with passive pages, there really isn't any, though). Not only that, but cut-down newer CPUs, like mobile Haswell (and soon, Skylake) Celerons and Pentiums, are way peppier for things like web browsing, even if ALU-bound, more than memory-bound, benchmarks are unimpressive. But, (a) even the latest i7s are no match for all the connections building up, on popular sites, and (b) while Chrome does it some, Firefox is really bad about hogging the CPU to busy-wait, so all that CPU usage is not necessarily indicative of more work needing to be done to render the page, as you're waiting for it to finish loading (if I temporarily disable ad-blocking, it'll hog 13% until the page is done, and it's mostly the round-trips to a bazillion different domains adding up that makes the time).
Ad-blocking makes a far greater speed difference than a few CPU generations, as does NoScript (but, uBO or ABP or ABE can be used by anyone, while NoScript takes us crazy people to put up with
). I can bear a Core 2 with such blocking extensions in place. An i7-6700 without them, though, on fiber, even, is just too damned slow. The difference, without preventing all those unnecessary connections, isn't much, IME. When the 50ms here, and 100ms there, keep piling on, especially if changes made to the page with Javascript then cause it load more Javascript from elsewhere, and it ends up taking seconds, no matter the CPU. With sites using Javascript like that, caching can't help much, either.
For example, cnn.com, with uBlock Origin running, in FF, on an i5-3470:
Over 400ms for global.css, which it waits for, before continuing.
Over a full second for the next batch of CSS and Javascript files, with some font query CSS URL taking the longest.
Then, a lot of small wait times, like 10-20ms.
Then, many zone-manager.html pages, most of which take little time, but one takes over a second, again, and ti seems to wait until they are done to move on.
Then, it's running through a batch of JPGs.
It's past the 3.5s mark, now, as it takes awhile to load CNNVideoBootstrapper.js, and related files.
It then has several queries to related domains, which won't get any benefit from caching, and which are done in succession, adding about another half a second.
Several more javascript files get loaded at the end.
Edit: wiith a Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz, also with uBlock Origin on, that front page takes ~6.5s, instead of ~5.5s, cold. IMO, there's no excuse for any site to take more than ~2s, if all I'm doing is consuming content on it.
By the time it was done, it had made 115 connections, with many of them blocking the rest of the page from loading until they finished, resulting in over 5 seconds of load time with a cold cache, and over 4 on reload (the queries take up almost all the time, with the warm cache). Now, I don't normally go to CNN.com, but that was a site I could think of off the top of my head that exhibits such problems. Big blog sites, newer forum websites, news sites I might visit due to interest, etc., though, do the same sort of thing, quite commonly, and getting rid of connections that aren't necessary is the only good way to speed them up. A Core 2 might take 2-3x as long to compile and initially run some of the javascript, but that's not a majority of the load time. Most such websites' load times seem dominated by ads, trackers, widgets, etc., and extensions like ad-blockers, Ghostery, and NoScript make huge differences, much more than CPUs, once you're above Atoms and cats.
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