[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.