Indeed. I was also wondering why people would buy newer chips if they don’t show performance increases per dollar.
Of course Moore's law is slowing down, but cores/$ is an extremely silly metric to use
Does Google Sheets provide a "inflation-adjusted dollar" function?
But anyway, I’m not sure if it makes sense to expect performance/$ to always increase anyway. I mean, I know this started out by talking about multicore, but think about single threaded performance. They’ve already grabbed all the low hanging fruit, the challenge now is finding increasingly hard to hunt down tweaks… a small improvement might require massive engineering effort.
A simple and regular ISA is what makes ARM easier to implement, which also means lower power because of fewer transistors doing thankless work like decoding instructions and reordering them.