Sometimes I wonder how much of this feeling comes from expecting more from more power/thermal/area constrained devices. My experience working with top-shelf wor

Sometimes I wonder how much of this feeling comes from expecting more from more power/thermal/area constrained devices. My experience working with top-shelf workstation-grade CPUs in mid-tower cases with excellent cooling is far separated from my experience even with M1 Macs. Having 16 cores, 64GB+ RAM, and 300W of thermal capacity is a big improvement. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-9-5950x https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Compare Zen 3 to M1... M1 is a generation ahead in lithography and enjoys an appreciable thermal/efficiency advantage resultingly. Zen 3 and M1 have neck-and-neck single core performance on many tasks. Yet Zen 3 can offer many more cores and make up for its efficiency in raw thermal envelope availability. Then also the expectation from older and more inexpensive devices. If one gets used to M1-level performance, a $200 CPU from 4 years ago starts to look quite slow; e.g., the Ryzen 5 1600: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-5-1600 https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Once we start to look at the truly power constrained, say a mainstream phone from a few years ago; let's say the iPhone 8/X since it's one of the best selling in recent history. Then you're at about 50% of the single threaded performance AND working with fewer cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones#2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1655-vs-apple_m1-1804 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a11_bionic-1... There is another large factor at play in the past 20 years in particular though: that is the increasing predominance of "Python-like" languages. I mean that in the sense that more of the code we interact with on a daily basis is written at a very high level than 20 years ago. Python in particular is just about the least efficient of all the most widely deployed languages. Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency: https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf 2021 Top Languages: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/