So, as someone still using an OC'd 2600k from 2011 there is still little point in upgrading which feels crazy.
Consider that the 7700K in question gets similar performance to your Sandy Bridge box at probably 1/3 of the power draw. (I had a 4.2GHz 2600K for a few years and the socket pulled about 102W, so I'm guessing that's what you're looking at). A 3X increase in power efficiency is certainly not a lack of progress, it's just that you don't care.
The office became noticeably cooler, it was a good upgrade.
So, no lower power is not a solid reason to upgrade.
That's 4 years running the CPU at full tilt. The 2600K will idle at a lot less than 102W
Yeah, and OP was saying that was only the socket consumption, you've also got to add in chipset, memory, discrete GPU, hard drives, NIC, sound, etc... and power supply overhead as well.
I bet that system was pulling 400-500W total under the load he described.
Further the delta is only like 60w under full load.
It's just not cheap, being a 240mm2 die (almost twice what Kaby Lake is, with attendant yield penalties) targetted at a niche market with low volume.
So your point isn't that Intel isn't innovating, it's that you want them to do it in a way that violates straightforward economics and hand it to you for less than it takes to produce.
Basically: you got spoiled by the early days of the VLSI revolution. Silicon scaling isn't doing what you expect any more.
They don't do this because they have zero real completion and can milk the high end market. Further, by holding back performance gains they can extend the upgrade cycle as long as possible.
PS: Cellphones are approaching Desktop chip performance.
Yeah, that's not how silicon manufacturing works. Tooling up for a new part of this size and ramping production gets into the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. No one does niche-market (and yes, gaming desktops are niche) parts at the prices you expect.
Low-volume big parts cost a thousand dollars or more, that's no different at Intel than it is anywhere else.
Further, Intel already has a range of chips in production making that 100's of millions per chip vastly overblown. You can measure these numbers in several ways, but ramping up 100 million of chip X or 80 million of chip X and 20 million of chip version Y is nowhere near 200+ million.
Just finished a CAD workstation build for my wife with state of the art components. The performance gain over a couple years old "pro laptop" she used before is enormous. And not just on raytraced views and renders, the whole UX is much much smoother.
I recently upgraded from an '09 processor because my motherboard died. Trying to find a new one to fit the old chipset was rough, so I got a processor as well. I didn't need to get a new processor, because it wasn't the bottleneck. There are many instances where the new one will give me better results, but it wasn't so bad that I was hurting. Unless you have a specific need, upgrading for the sake of upgrading is largely wasted money.
The browser is a desktop application and, once the page is loaded off the network, is certainly CPU bound.
EDIT: no addons either
My old desktop was passed down to my wife, who was previously using my 3rd most recent desktop, a Core2 Duo (E6600 I think). The 2500K/2600K still has much life left in it for many tasks.
A 10% increase per generation may not sound like a lot, but it adds up over a few iterations.