The unsung hero of early computing was Dennard scaling. Taking CPUS from 10MHz to 2GHz, all alongside massive per-clock efficiency improvements must have been a crazy time.
From a 50MHz 486 in 1990 to a 1.4GHz P3 in 2000 is a factor of 28 improvement in speed solely due to clock speed! Add on all the other multiplicative improvements from IPC...
The greatest increase in clock frequency has been in the decade 1993-2003, when the clock frequency has increased 50 times (from a 66 MHz Pentium to a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4).
Since then, in more than 20 years, the clock frequency has increased only 2 times, while in the previous decade (1983-1993) it had increased only about 5 times, where a doubling of the clock frequency (33 to 66 MHz) had occurred between 1989 and 1993 (for cheap CPUs with MOS logic, because expensive CPUs using ECL had reached 80 MHz already during the seventies).
Also, Pentium III has reached 1.4 GHz only in early 2002, not in 2000, while 80486 has reached 50 GHz only in 1991, not in 1990.
The P4 was nothing to celebrate. Clock for clock it was slower than it’s predecessor. The subsequent generation was based on the Pentium M, which was more energy efficient.
> while 80486 has reached 50 GHz only in 1991, not in 1990.
Your typo got me wondering — what would the performance of an actual 50GHz 486 look like compared to modern single-core performance?
The lack of speculative execution combined with atrocious memory latencies and next to no cache should be enough to annihilate most if not all of the advantage from the faster clock — CPU is just going to be idling waiting for data. Then there’s the amount of work you can get done per cycle, and SIMD, and…
From a 50MHz 486 in 1990 to a 1.4GHz P3 in 2000 is a factor of 28 improvement in speed solely due to clock speed! Add on all the other multiplicative improvements from IPC...