[ajross]

This is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded (turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on the die.

But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.

For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.

[zokier]

The (single threaded) performance improvement is significantly larger. Anandtech has 2005 vintage Pentium in their benchmarks: http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836 and there is probably a significant perf difference between 2002 and 2005.

And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There are your 100x differences