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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get this idea? Single-threaded performance has improved substantially in the past several generations of Intel processors. Single-threaded performance and clock speeds have not been correlated outside of same generation for a while now - like over a decade.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

There's are 2.8GHz processors at the top of that benchmark with a 3100 score and one near the bottom with a 539 score, as well as everywhere in between.

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Probably he based his opinion on speed of progress. In 2006 you could buy Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. Modern processor at 4.5GHz would be maybe just 3 times faster in normal, every day, single thread use which seems like a lot, but isn't too much if you think that CPUs 14 years before Core 2 Duo were clocked at 33MHz and IPC slightly below 1.

My dad uses a computer with C2Q CPU and it's still fast enough for everyday use.

Edit: to be clear, he's still wrong, we had quite untrivial IPC increase during all these years. I just wanted to point out that he's comment probably was based on empirical data.

One of my desktops is a C2Q and I swear I could get another decade out of it yet.

5% increase per gen for most of the past decade vs. 50% increase per gen when clock speeds were increasing in lock step along with transistor count, but sure.

I've got a 13 year old laptop that runs today's OS's and development software a little slow but ultimately just fine, and if it weren't for a low limit on installed RAM it would be more than "ultimately" just fine.

That would've been absolutely laughable even 10 years ago, much less 20. You'd be lucky to be able to run a then-current OS on 2-3 year old hardware in the 90's through early 2000's.

I started out with an 80286.

Some years later I got a 486. The difference was night and day.

Some years later I got a Pentium 150. The difference was night and day.

Some years later I got a Pentium III. The difference was night and day.

Some five years ago I had a i7 2600k. I now got a Ryzen 3800x. Is it faster? Yes. Is it night and day? For what I do every day, no.

Of course they are not linearly scalable across generation, but last significant performance improvement was in Sandy Bridge. Let's compare for example i5-2500 and i3-9100, more or less similar chips in terms of the number of cores and cpu freq. Their single thread performance (normalized per GHz) is within 25% from each other. In the last 10 years we've got 25% increase in IPC. If we compare with slightly more modern CPU's such i5-3570 it becomes even more laughable meager 10%. So, yeah we are reaching the limit of IPC, if not reached already.

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