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> P4 would have to be running at over 20GHz to match what the i7 is doing on a per-core basis.

Seems to me memory getting 10x more bandwidth and cache getting 8x larger probably accounts for the majority of the performance differences between these processors not instructions per cycle, which I think has gone up by more like 2x.

So a Pentium 4 with current memory and cache would need to be more like 8 Ghz if it scaled linearly like that (P4 had ~3 instructions per cycle, i7 ~7-8).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second