The overall performance of Intel's range of processors may not have changed much, but what they called an i3, i5 or i7 sure has lately. For example, the popular

The overall performance of Intel's range of processors may not have changed much, but what they called an i3, i5 or i7 sure has lately. For example, the popular i7-7700k is most similar in terms of core count, clocks etc to the current i3 chips, and I don't think there was any real equivalent to the current i5 or i7 chips back then. If I remember rightly, the generations prior to that were still seeing actual performance improvements generation-on-generation too.