One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obviousy since we are talking of 8 new cores matching 12 old cores the single thread performance will be 50% faster.

Wait, what? 50% faster? Is that all? I mean, many tasks are still single threaded and from 2010 to 2018 we have grown 50% in single thread and 100% in multithread? If things were going the "old way" then in 8 years would've seen a 2^(8/1.5) -- well over thirty times speedup (Moore's law as stated by David House who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months). You can see some of that http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm here.

No wonder there's no point focusing on old CPUs any more.