[michaelt]

> Have clock speeds really plateaued?

Pentium 4 HT 3.8F, November 2004, 3.8GHz, 115W TDP

Core i9-13900KF, October 2022, 3.0GHz, 125W TDP

Of course, the latter does give you 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores so performance-per-watt has clearly improved; and it has 'turbo boost'. But in terms of sustained single-core performance? It's clear Intel's attention has been elsewhere. Such as on the laptop market, where power efficiency is king.

[dagw]

CPUMark single threaded score for the P4: ~620

CPUMark single threaded score for the 13900K ~4800

So obviously a lot has changed and improved.

[psykus]

I'm curious if single threaded* games/applications that were CPU limited when the P4 originally came out run better on the 13900k with the same code.

That was my impression from games at the time, that they were coded with an expectation that clock speeds would keep going up in the future. But they didn't and the games probably run just as bad now as they did before.

[iggldiggl]

And even in the Pentium 4 days, AMD CPUs managed similar performance as a Pentium 4 while running at lower clock speeds (which was a problem with some games that tried to auto-tune their performance-settings purely based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even if you had an AMD CPU – thankfully at least in the Maxis/EA case, those settings were easily hackable, though, and could be easily adjusted to better match non-Pentium 4 CPUs, too).

[weberer]

Right. But not clock speed.

[dagw]

Which only goes to show how meaningless clock speed is in isolation

[dTal]

Clock speed has indeed plateaued, but the single-core performance of the i9 is going to be vastly superior to the Pentium 4.