Monday, March 05, 2012

A Look Back at Single-Threaded CPU Performance


The red line is meant to represent mainstream CPU performance. I drew it manually, using the less-than-scientific method of eyeballing the points for Pentium, PowerPC, Athlon and Core. If you're willing to trust this line, it seems that in the eight years since January 2004, mainstream performance has increased by a factor of about 4.6x, which works out to 21% per year. Compare that to the 28x increase between 1996 and 2004! Things have really slowed down.


---SPSmith

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