While I agree that the increase in speed per socket was greater in the 15 years between 1992 and 2007 than in the following 15 years from 2007 to 2022, your com

While I agree that the increase in speed per socket was greater in the 15 years between 1992 and 2007 than in the following 15 years from 2007 to 2022, your comparison for the cache size is not correct. A motherboard with a 486 CPU of 1992 would have had an L2 cache memory with a size between 64 kB and 256 kB, made with discrete SRAM chips. During the year 2000, the second generations of Intel Pentium III and of AMD Athlon were the first to have an L2 cache memory integrated in the CPU. When first launched in 1999, both Pentium III and Athlon still had external L2 cache memories. External L2 cache memories had been the norm in all motherboards except in the cheapest models, starting already with 80386DX, before 1990. So the L2 cache memory of 2007 was only around 64 times the size of that of 1992. The increase in IPC (instructions per clock cycle) was huge between 1985 and 1995, i.e. 80386 => 80486 => Pentium => Pentium Pro. After that, the increase in IPC has been continuous until the AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake of 2024, but at a much slower pace. From 1995 to 2003, there was a huge increase in clock frequency, from 0.2 GHz to 3.2 GHz, i.e. 16 times, while in the next 20 years the clock speed has increased less than 2 times. From 2005 (AMD dual core) until today the greatest speed increases have been provided by either increasing the number of cores per socket or the width of the SIMD execution units. For consumer CPUs (i.e. non-server) Intel has provided a sequence of throughput doublings in the sequence Core 2 (double SIMD throughput vs. previous Athlon X2) => Nehalem (4 cores/socket) => Sandy Bridge (double SIMD throughput) => Haswell (double SIMD throughput), but after that the following throughput doublings in consumer CPUs have all been provided by AMD, with the increase of the number of cores per socket to 8 then 16, and now with the double width of the SIMD units in the desktop variant of Zen 5, i.e. Granite Ridge. So the increase in throughput per socket (in personal computers) between 2004 and 2024 has been of 256 times, due to increases of core count or SIMD width. For comparison with this 20-year improvement, the increase in clock frequency from 1985 to 2003, during 18 years, had been from 16 MHz to 3.2 GHz, i.e. of 200 times. I do not know the exact increase in IPC between 1985 and 2003, as that would require the choice of a benchmark program, to be run both on an 80386 and on a Pentium 4 or on an Opteron, but it might have been around 20 times. The increase in IPC from 2003 to 2024 might be of at most 6 to 8 times, when accepting an increase of 10% to 20% every 2 to 3 years. So overall, with a doubling of the clock frequency from 2004 to 2024, there would be an increase in the throughput per socket for personal (non-server) computers of around 4000 times both during the 19 years from 1985 to 2004 and during the last 20 years. This corresponds on average to a little more than a doubling of the throughput per socket (in personal computers) every 2 years, during the last 40 years (i.e. from an Intel 80386 @ 16 MHz to an AMD 9950X).