[dippyskoodlez]

Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space.

An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.

[autokad]

Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine.

in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time.

I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time.

i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years