[MacsHeadroom]

3.6GHz from 10 years ago and 3.6GHz from today aren't the same though. Modern processors have way more specialized hardware for common tasks that weren't common a decade ago.

Yes, the compute cores are going at the same speed. But you aren't getting the significant advantage of other hardware optimizations.

Just look at the M1 benchmarks for goodness sake. (A bit unfair because it's RISC-V based, but even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.)

[scottlocklin]

>even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.

No, it really hasn't! My ancient x220 is still as fast as, or faster than almost all pre 2020 laptops. By contrast, hardware in the period of time ~9 years before 2011 when I bought it is absurdly slower to the point of unusability. Same story with my threadripper versus my 2009 era desktop. For single threaded stuff, not IO bound, they're subjectively about the same. If I need a lot of threads, big memory or big IO, the recent machine is comically faster (like 100-1000x), but lots of things are single thread bound. Again if I take the leap back in time separating the threadripper from my 2009 era machine; there were huge improvements in performance; imagine trying to compile something on a 1998 era tower like OP did.

[eivarv]

M1 isn't RISC-V, but a custom ARM.

[MacsHeadroom]

The R in ARM is for RISC.

[eivarv]

So what?

RISC-V is a specific (RISC-based) ISA. ARM is a family of RISC-architectures, which does not include RISC-V.

Apple's M1 is an ARM SoC. It does not use RISC-V.