Modern processors have not just increased in core count, but also in how efficient their pipelining, parallelizing, and instruction reordering is. We used to me

Modern processors have not just increased in core count, but also in how efficient their pipelining, parallelizing, and instruction reordering is. We used to measure CPUs by cycles/instruction, but modern CPUs have inverted that relationship and now we can execute several instructions per cycle, so each cycle is actually doing more even if we can't squeeze more cycles in per second.