TESTA Single core performance has improved by an average of 30% per year for the last five years.
Back the late nineties the rate of increase in cpu horsepower was phenomenal, every two years processor throughput was doubling. As clock speeds reached 3 and then 4 GHz the emphasis shifted from linear single processor speed to multi-threaded performance. There has been a relatively slow and predictable improvement in performance over the last five years and there is no longer the need to upgrade a CPU more than once every three years. In terms of single core performance, a reasonable proxy for real world performance, the late 2007 Core2 Duo E6550 scored 881 points on PassMark-S vs 2080 points achieved by the Mid 2012 Core i7 3770K, roughly a 140% increase in performance over the last five years or roughly a thirty percent improvement per year.
Back the late nineties the rate of increase in cpu horsepower was phenomenal, every two years processor throughput was doubling. As clock speeds reached 3 and then 4 GHz the emphasis shifted from linear single processor speed to multi-threaded performance. There has been a relatively slow and predictable improvement in performance over the last five years and there is no longer the need to upgrade a CPU more than once every three years. In terms of single core performance, a reasonable proxy for real world performance, the late 2007 Core2 Duo E6550 scored 881 points on PassMark-S vs 2080 points achieved by the Mid 2012 Core i7 3770K, roughly a 140% increase in performance over the last five years or roughly a thirty percent improvement per year.
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