You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's wer

You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it. Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.