From the 80s up until about 2010 every new computer I purchased has about 3x the performance of the one before it.
Now people are excited about +10% squeezed out through heroic efforts and more watts than my space heater.
Now people are excited about +10% squeezed out through heroic efforts and more watts than my space heater.
I have a Ryzen 3950X and I suspect even now there’s a noticeable speed improvement at the top end, and I don’t feel like upgrading yet. That was still a big improvement over the Intel 3930K (?) I had before, even though sandy bridge was when progression started to show a slowdown.
I do think it’s perhaps easier to buy a computer with some weird bottleneck (crappy storage and the like) which will present day-to-day performance on par with your outgoing computer. Day-to-day high performance is seemingly hard to get right even if you can crunch numbers faster. Sort of a latency vs throughput problem.
Also squeezing ever more single threaded performance from inherently parallel scaling only (more transistors running at the same speed), as well as memory not being able to scale at the same rate as computing performance is really putting a damper on things.
3 years after the Apple M1, the M3 increased transistor count from 16 billion to 25 billion. Two years saw the 5950x with 8.3 billion transistors go to the 7950x with 13.1 billion transistors. That's quite not the predicted rate of scaling, but it is respectable.
2x the transistors doesn't mean 2x the performance though. We can make plenty of logic, but the DRAM to feed it remains high latency and the SRAM to hide the latency isn't scaling well either. PHYs are consuming proportionally more silicon too. One might say that Moore's Law isn't dead, but diminishing in relevance.