IPCs. Instructions per clock. We haven't had a strict clock speed = performance ratio for over a decade, it's just one component of it now. https://en.wikiped

IPCs. Instructions per clock. We haven't had a strict clock speed = performance ratio for over a decade, it's just one component of it now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_per_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_per_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second Rather than just bumping clock speed, they've made improvements on what can be done within the clock cycle. I recently did a desktop rebuild. Went from a Ryzen 7 2700X to a Ryzen 5 5600X. On paper, this looks like a downgrade. After all, the 7 is higher than a 5, right? I have two more cores with a 2700X... However, the 5600x has about a 28% IPC gain over the 2700x in single core performance despite running at the same base clock speed. Literally 20%+ faster in the same tasks even when taking the turbo boost out of the equation. The 2700x was at 12/14nm process while the 5600x is at 7nm which also helps with the power consumption as the 5600x has a 40 watt lower TDP. Since what I need is better single core performance over more cores, the 5600X is quite an upgrade despite only being two years newer. (A LOT has happened in 2 years with AMD) With two less cores but significantly higher single core performance, the 5600X outperforms the 2700X on both single core and multicore performance. Unfortunately for Intel, they did a lot of little tweaks and cheats to gain performance at the expense of security and now the mitigation patches pulls their chips back to the Bulldozer era in terms of current performance. They were also stuck at the same node for almost a decade now (Broadwell, 2014), so they had no gains from a shrink (speed of light propagation gain from a shrink, less heat and higher clocks also). My i7-4790k is full of jank and microstuttering now, it has become unusable. Imagine how the servers might be doing if (and they should be) they are being kept up to date on security and microcode patches. Then there also comes with spec upgrades within the processor generations. Ryzen 2700X to 5600X also means PCI Express went from 3.0 to 4.0... Not hugely significant among desktop users, but substantial for servers that need that amount of link bandwidth for compute cards and storage. TLDR: Magic.