My laptop has a 2018 quad-core , but the ultra low voltage kind, and I even made sure there it’s limited at 15 watts because - as a working machine - i want it to be quieter , not faster.
But it also doesn’t have a GPU, And opencl is disabled .
If i take a 24mp image , with multiple instances of diffuse (sharpen no aa sharpen lens blur , local contrast fast ) , and lens corrections , and chromatic fixes , two instances of denoise (profiled) and the whole modern workflow module set , it starts crawling speedwise. But even then it takes like 30 to 40 seconds for an export .
For comparison , DxO export with their sharpening and their latest famous denoising takes 1m20 for a single image.
Now, your i5 model is older so a dual core , not a quad-core. And yes, intel did very little year on year to improve itself during those times , but still i think a laptop CPU from 2012 is quite a bit slower ‘core for core’, and then you have two less cores. So yes , around 2 minutes per image sounds reasonable then. But that is eith the most expensive modules absolutely loaded (denoise and diffuse ). Without those modules , my export time drops down to under 5 seconds per image.
Now , for reference . My desktop machine with an - now also quite old 
- amd Ryzen 2700 eight core machine with an (original price ) cheap gaming CPU (GTX 1060) can do the same loaded export in under 10 seconds .
The DxO export drops down from 1m20 to 12 seconds. Thats mostly due to the fact there is a GPU to work with.
It can make a massive difference if speed is important for you.
And I guess compared to the original Sony software… Do you know anyone actually using it ? I installed it once hoping to try out their updated sharpening algorithms on my older camera , but they don’t use the newer , better algorithms on files shot with a camera that came before that times … So i removed it directly after it.
Speed and quality and usability differs greatly per raw processing software , makes comparing them kinda useless IMHO. Everyone is looking for something else.
On1 photo raw for example takes 30 seconds ro switch from image to image . Not export time, but ‘loading’ time. It makes it completely unusable for me. I know lots of people are happy with it , but for me that is a deal breaker.
If Darktable’s export speed on your system is a deal breaker for you , that’s perfectly fine and understandable. But don’t expect it to get any faster, only heavier and more gpu reliant I’m guessing :).