[urthor]

> single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

It's amazing how often this is parroted. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the numbers knows this is actually not true at all.

Better caching, branch prediction, plus vast amounts of SRAM. There's been a slow & steady increase in the vast variety of single threaded workloads grouped together by "instructions per clock."

Both at the peak of the voltage frequency curve for workstations & overclocking, the apex of the optimization curve for data centre, and especially at the bare minimum for mobile devices with idle workloads.

Yes, it's a small fraction of the old days. It's still double in 10 years.

And as anyone who's migrated from an Intel Mac to Apple Silicon knows, "merely doubling" is a LOT.

[gilbetron]

Sorry, doubling in 10 years vs doubling in 18 months effectively is plateauing! Especially since it isn't really a consistent 10% growth per year, but a decelerating growth over that decade. Furthermore, much of the purported single thread performance is taken from a small set of benchmark tests, and so chip makers just optimize them for those tests. Generic single thread performance has undoubtedly not doubled in that 10 years.

[urthor]

In any field of any kind except probably silicon, 100% growth in a decade would be marvelous. I don't think anyone could call it a plateau.

> Furthermore, much of the purported single thread performance is taken from a small set of benchmark tests, and so chip makers just optimize them for those tests

"Single thread" is a notoriously difficult benchmark to quantify. Instruction queue depth, floating vs integer, branching vs linear, there are so many variables.

Passmark is fine. Workload simulation is state of the art.