[marvelous]

I don't think knowing that is usefull. "Single processors" are all superscalar or pipelined these days, so the colossal single-thread FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many arithmetic units and one has to coordinate these units (mainly avoiding branch mispredictions) in any application that takes advantage of them.

[ddingus]

It's still relevant. Some applications remain single threaded due to data dependencies.

Mechanical CAD geometry kernels are one such application. Recently, I had a use case that demanded the peak single threaded performance.

In PC land, it's this chip clocked at 4.x Ghz: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K. It's multi-core performance is pretty great too, so it's not that big of a trade-off to maximize single thread performance.

I would be very interested in knowing what faster solutions exist. Are there any, regardless of instruction set?