On the contrary, _not_ expecting at least 20% per year (more for generations farther apart) is actually only a recent take for CPUs [1][2] which formed in what

On the contrary, _not_ expecting at least 20% per year (more for generations farther apart) is actually only a recent take for CPUs [1][2] which formed in what I like to call "the great stagnation" of the mid 2010s where AMD bombed, ARM was still a low performance mobile play, and Intel didn't have any stiff competition. After that things have started to pick up a little again now that there is innovation on said fronts [3] I remember there was even a period Moore's law was commonly conflated with "a doubling in performance every 2 years" (implies people being used to an increase of at least 41% per year) instead of a doubling in transistor count. Because Intel's tick-tock model started ~5 years prior to the great stagnation people commonly claimed it's the end of Moore's law and that's why we have tick-tock's now. Of course these days it's common knowledge that Moore's law (the actual transistor count version) has been holding steady all these years still and that the performance lull wasn't related to hitting and innate technical scaling barriers. Marketing departments are definitely going to be marketing departments but they aren't the origin of the idea CPUs can have more than minor increments in performance each year. [1] https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png [2] https://preshing.com/images/float-point-perf.png https://preshing.com/images/float-point-perf.png [3] https://i.imgur.com/HlGbJE9.png https://i.imgur.com/HlGbJE9.png (note this chart is linear not log)