| As other have touched on, the apparent slowdown in processor speeds is due to computers have enough CPU power for most users needs. Today computing power in personal computers is basically a commodity, with companies now having to focus on other aspects to be able to sell their computers. Namely weight, battery life, network connectivity etc. Having said that, the chips are still developing, but now the focusing is on the new user demands rather than raw speed. E.g. we now have native decoding of audio, video, networking, low power modes, etc to increase battery life. (And thereby decrease weight) While the consumer GPU's are also getting faster, it's not due to more advanced use cases, but rather because computers now have screens with higher screen resolutions. I believe that processing power became a commodity around a single core GeekBench Browser score of about 2500 (Think Late 2011 Macbook pro - note using browser score here to be able to compare apples to apples). Interestingly, this is now pretty much exactly where the newest iPhones are. (Android only just now reaching the 2k's). In essence, with the latest and greatest chips on mobile, we are reaching the point where processing speed is now a commodity on this platform. However as with PC's we will likely see a bit of overshooting, so expect the mobile CPU race to continue until around a GeekBench Browser score of 3000-3200. Hopefully this will result in companies starting to compete on battery life of the device as was seen with laptops. E.g. the newest MacBook Pro claims 9 hours of battery, compared to the 4 hours promised for the Late 2011 Macbook Pro. The only obvious unknown I can think of, is if the average consumer embraces Virtual Reality, rather than it becoming a niche such as high quality PC gaming. Then we might once again see a new strong focus towards raw single core computing power, both on Desktop and Mobile. |