11 ms·

The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time

311 points by doener 2y ago

blufish 2y ago
but we got more battery life
cluckindan 2y ago
Hyperthreading and speculative execution are going out of fashion? Now if we could just get rid of fake frames on the GPU side.
- feifan 2y ago
  I'd suspect some sort of economic factor, or sampling … e.g. just people with lower specs submitting and bringing down the average
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It just got introduced and NVDA needs to inflate its stock more. But yes, I agree on principle: https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58ef1de5e https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58e...
- utopcell 2y ago
  Well, Intel abandoned hyperthreading with Lunar Lake, so it's definitely going out of fashion.
  - esseph 2y ago
    For Intel, yes.
noizejoy 2y ago
Price increases due to multiple factors from higher interest rates to trade wars, etc. are tempering the financial enthusiasm of customers to buy at the higher end, maybe?
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
Moore's law crushed by capitalism? Does anyone else have a better explanation?
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Most likely explanation is that we are comparing 1 months worth of data for 2025 to the full years worth on previous years. The laptops people will have over 2025 haven't been purchased yet. I'd expect the chart to be basically flat for the year to date, but a tiny drop isn't particularly surprising either.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I am super curious, if you’ll indulge me. What kind of economic policy would have let Moores law continue as it had been? Conversely, do you think Moores law would have been faster than 18? months if… someone else identified Moores law? Slower? Exist at all?
- derkster 2y ago
  Intel spend was spending upwards of 15% a quarter on stock buybacks, while also being stalled out on 10nm with the yield improvements "right around the corner", every quarter, for at least 18 months. I don't blame capitalism, but I do blame lack of regulation regarding stock buybacks, especially talking about the United States only home fab.
- veltas 2y ago
  Capitalism started Moore's law.
slyall 2y ago
Discussion from a day or so ago. 59 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43017612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43017612
RachelF 2y ago
I wonder why? Some possibilities: 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance? 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions? 3. Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities? 4. Most computers are now "fast enough" for the average user, no need to buy top end. 5. Intel's new CPUs are slower than the old ones
- dehrmann 2y ago
  4 has been true for over a decade.
  - kome 2y ago
    i use a 10 years old macbook air and honestly i can do everything i need, statistics, light programming, browsing and photo editing. perfect. i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.
    - skyyler 2y ago
      I use a 10 years old macbook pro and the only thing I dislike is the battery life and the heat generated. I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now. Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Surely, the new MacBook Airs offer better performance than a 10 year old MacBook Pro. The M3 is very reasonable, 16GB/512GB for $1,100 or $1,300 for 15 inch I think. Could be going lower too with M4 MacBook Air purportedly releasing in Mar or Apr.
        omnimus 2y ago
        I have cheapest air 8gig and its just fine for anything i do if i dont open 80tabs. But for sure wait for M4 as 16gig ram will be the base model. Coworker just got MacMini m4 and i dont see why that machine wouldnt be enough for 90% of people.
wiredfool 2y ago
As the chart is updated bi-weekly, but the data point that may change is for the current year. The first few days or weeks of a new year are less accurate compared to the end of a year.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  January 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123174954/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240123174954/https://www.cpube... January 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpube... Still, both previous years were notably up after the first month already. This is different and perhaps notable regardless. Either the release schedule is skewed forward or the hardware is genuinely stagnating. Or perhaps the benchmark is hitting some other CPU unrelated bottleneck.
  - palijer 2y ago
    This is just still a sample size of three for a data period that is stated to be less accurate" not "has lower values" Just because the error isn't presented the same here doesn't mean it's error free...
  - lolinder 2y ago
    http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpuben... They have more than twice as many samples on their Feb 10 update this year (47810) as they did last year on Feb 14 (22761). They have shown some growth year on year in sample size, but nowhere near doubling. That suggests this month has been an outlier in having a strangely large number of samples already, which could all be related—maybe their software started being bundled with a specific OEM or was featured on a popular content creator or whatever. As a sibling notes, less accurate just means less accurate, not necessarily skewed upward. There simply is less data to draw conclusions on than there will be later, so any medium-sized effect that adds 20k extra samples will have a larger effect now than later.
vladms 2y ago
People got smarter and buy only what they need?
ZiiS 2y ago
:shrug: CPU performance is a rounding error on your GPU and RAM bottlenecks.
- Osiris 2y ago
  The GPU being a bottleneck over the CPU is only in very specific scenarios. Can you be more specific about what message you're trying to convey?
  - ZiiS 2y ago
    In the 90s and 00s paying more for CPU ment I could work faster. I was extreemly grateful for each breakthrough. Even in the 10s this wasn't really true. Storage and bandwith took a bigger slice and CPU was in abundance. We are now at the point I could easy serve the DB and App servers of a multi-million SaaS off my mobile phone. The few remaining areas where compute is still the bottleneck at all: video encoding, 3d rendering, mining, and predominantly now AI; also tend not to focuse on the CPU.
Osiris 2y ago
Looking at the top end chart, which flat lined, it seems that the biggest contributor would be a slower release cycle of the most performant chips. It looks like the score of the top end chips were dragging up the average. With the top spot not changing, the average is falling. I'm curious what median and std dev look like.
nxpnsv 2y ago
Arguably a majority of improvements in 2025 haven’t happened yet, seems premature to conclude anything in February.
varispeed 2y ago
Friend of mine bought Zephyrus G16 with Intel 185H and 32GB RAM. He thought this will help him studying and he chose it because some software he has to use is only available for Windows. He called me to have a look as the laptop has been sluggish for him. This thing barely can handle Office, Teams and the browser. Hot, noisy as hell and performance wise I see no difference over laptops from decade ago. Tragic. To be fair I don't think I could do anything. Task manager showed CPU as under utilised, yet fans were blasting, editing Word document looked like a slideshow. ASUS tools showed no problems. I don't know, feels like people are getting scammed with these new laptops. I still have M1 Max and never experienced anything like this.
- truekonrads 2y ago
  Uninstall all security except for Windows defender and see how it feels.
- odo1242 2y ago
  What were the disk specs? HDD or SSD? GPU? Windows is a heavy operating system compared to the others and can cause that problem but that likely isn't Windows alone causing the problem (though bloatware / other AV solutions could also have something to do with it)
  - varispeed 2y ago
    1TB NVMe and 4060 GPU
- iforgot22 2y ago
  Sounds a lot like a dedicated GPU is running and heat-throttling the whole thing, since you don't see CPU usage. I wanted to say gaming laptops are a scam, but the older Intel MBPs with dedicated GPUs suffered too. More trouble than they're worth.
  - varispeed 2y ago
    One thing I notice is that Google Drive was using 15% of ARC GPU (laptop also has nVidia 4060). When I shut down that process, it cooled down a bit after a while, but system is still sluggish and fans work all the time, even if I switched it to "Silent" mode.
bjourne 2y ago
Could it be related to world-wide inflation and decreasing real wages? Salaries have not kept up, hence people can't afford as powerful hardware as they used to. It also seems that top-of-the-line hardware don't depreciate as fast as it used to. Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, for example.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  > Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.
  - ttt3ts 2y ago
    New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now. Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
    - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better than the 4090 in raster performance.
      - blangk 2y ago
        Yep. The whole fake frames thing seems like a witch hunt to me. If you can actually get a 5090 and were previously fully utilising a 3090 or 4090, it is a significant upgrade, as long as it doesn't burn your house down.
        7speter 2y ago
        I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd, even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once in a while.
walrus01 2y ago
I have a theory that cpu performance in laptops plateauing is something we'll see more of in the future, as manufacturers further optimize for battery life and being very thin. 15 years ago I wanted a very powerful MacBook pro. Now I'm fine with a MacBook air and if I need to do something that requires heavy lifting, I have remote access (ssh, vnc over ssh, etc) into a loud, beefy hypervisor located somewhere else with 512GB of RAM in it. On the consumer level and for non technical end users, as more functions are offloaded to "the cloud" with peoples' subscriptions to office365, Google workspace, iCloud, whatever, having a ton of cpu power in the laptop also isn't as necessary anymore. Along with things like h.265 and av1 video encode and decode being done with GPU assist rather than purely in software.
kelvinjps10 2y ago
I'm using a thinkpad t480 and it runs everything fine
- nosioptar 2y ago
  My favorite computer is my t530. It's showing its age a bit, but the newer thinkpads I've used all feel like a step down quality wise I'll probably use the t530 as my primary machine for years to come.
layer8 2y ago
The chart also shows that single-thread performance hasn’t improved that much in the past twelve or so years, compared to Moore’s law. And this is compounded by Wirth’s law [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- jamesy0ung 2y ago
  It's always interesting when I install Linux on a machine, and it can fit all running processes on a single page in top.
altairprime 2y ago
It’s remarkable how carefully the page is worded to not incorporate Apple’s desktop and mobile CPU performance changes over time - but they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn’t exclude Apple Silicon like it used to thanks to Asahi.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Ultimately Apple has hit the same dead end too. Their designs and TSMC's processes aren't putting Moore's law back on the map, you can see it in the year-over-year performance. If tariffs end up hitting any harder, Apple can't just go to TSMC's Arizona plant and get faster silicon than what Taiwan has today. > they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn’t exclude Apple Silicon In the context of the second graph, that means Apple Silicon is also failing to push the envelope forwards.
  - altairprime 2y ago
    Apple has one advantage that PCs do not: each silicon release cycle is accompanied by a coordinated operating system and compiler release for CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads; so that they can hardware-accelerate functions inside the operating system and programs compiled to target the hardware far more rapidly than the PC industry. I remember a tweet from a couple years ago where the hardware-accelerated IPC calls for a system-wide performance gain (and thus a latency reduction slash benchmark improvement) of several percent within one of those year-long intervals — but such gains would be invisible to Linux, even Asahi, because it would require libc and kernel adaptations for different hardware generations, as well as reverse engineering those adaptations from the various macOS kernels and frameworks each year. I don’t think all of those gains can be measured relative to PCs at all, as there may not be any comparable equivalent of what’s being accelerated for PCs to measure — but it still stands out that they simply chose not to mention Apple at all, when they could have theoretically shown either the same slowdown or lack thereof in that domain now that multiple generations are available for easy testing.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      That's neither a new concept, nor unique to Apple. GCC and LLVM are both regularly updated by AMD and Intel who also optimize and patch their own microcode as well. When you compile the Linux kernel, and moreover Linux software, you will be doing it with the optimizations of your chosen architecture. For x86 that means OEMs provide optimizations for stuff like AVX and SSE, whereas Apple works in their equivalent proprietary frameworks like Accelerate. You can credit Apple (or more accurately, Lattner) with starting the trend, but Linux can be compiled using the same LLVM backend MacOS uses with whatever optimizations your OEM supports. > I remember a tweet from a couple years ago where the hardware-accelerated IPC calls for a system-wide performance gain Most kernels aren't bottlenecked by IPC throughput like XNU is. A modern Linux system might need IPC for dbus, a few journaling systems and systemd. Apple's entire kernel relies on the throughput of a message queue, so feasibly speeding that up matters quite a lot.
markhahn 2y ago
average reflects the population, of course. max graph shows no such fall - laptops going up even. how about this interpretation: desktops are fast enough; laptops are getting faster but people tend to buy more usable laptops, not faster ones.
zabzonk 2y ago
Could not get to the page. But, I dunno. I just bought an Asus Zenbook with an intel 9 ultra with Arc graphics 32Gb ram, 1tb SSD, and it seems pretty nifty to me, especially at the price.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  so 9 is fast? The rest of the specs are not CPU. My i7-13700H is shitting the bed due to poor software. Permanently on power-saving while charging because of "rapid charging". It'd be ok if it didn't render the whole computer useless at 400MHz, my first computer from circa 1996 is the only one clocked slower than that I ever had, and it had a turbo button
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    > The rest of the specs are not CPU Fair enuf. I was really trying to comment on the ultra/arc chip performance. > so 9 is fast? seems to be - my previous laptop was a Core i7, and my new 9 Ultra one is definitely faster (for what I do with it). It goes into power saving only when it gets below about 30% of battery charge, and Asus give a lot of switches to fiddle about with that.
zeroq 2y ago
Some 15 years ago I was playing DOTA on what you'd call today a gaming laptop (HP HDX9200) which would occasionally overheat causing BSOD and everytime it happened it was hail mary, because the boot time took around 5 minutes and it was the exact time for servers to flag me as leaver and ban me from future games. These days I have two main machines which boot to Windows in about a minute. Somehow I remember my old 486 machine was able to boot to DOS within the snap of a power button.
aboardRat4 2y ago
My experience with recent hardware is that it is very poorly designed, not as "computational hardware", but as a "consumer product". Buying anything new for me is out of question since a few years ago, because it just cannot be guaranteed to survive half a year, hence now I always buy second-hand, because this way at least it was tested by the previous owner. But even so, modern hardware is hellishly unreliable. I bought a Dell 7 series laptop (17 inches), and: 1. Already had to replace the battery back panel three times, just because it is being held by tiny plastic hooks which are easily torn away. 2. It's assembly-reassembly process is a nightmare (which used to not be the case for Dell in the past). 3. Already had to replace the fans (the laptop is not even 5 years old). but bear with me, the rest is more fun: 4. When running with a smaller battery (official), it CANNOT RUN THE GPU AT FULL SPEED EVEN WHEN PLUGGED INTO THE MAINS. Really? This is just ridiculous. A laptop using the battery when plugged in is just insane. 5. You MUST use a smaller battery to install a 2.5" SATA drive. So you much choose: either a SATA drive, or a GPU. 6. The power on/off button does not work if your BIOS battery has low charge. This is just maddening! What is the connection? Maybe it's just me and one single laptop? Well, in my experience, everything is getting similarly fragile. My phone has its thermal sensor installed ON THE BATTERY, so if you replace the battery, you have to replace the sensor as well, which is, oh, well, a harder thing to manufacture than a battery and on many non-official batteries always returns 0 (0 Kelvin that is, -273 Centigrade). The amount of cacti you have to swallow to get used to modern hardware is just staggering.
jiggawatts 2y ago
Even in data centres, I'm starting to see performance regressions: I just benchmarked the recently released Azure Ddsv6/Edsv6 series of virtual machines, and in several metrics they're slower than the Dadsv5/Eadsv5 series that are more than three years older! IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The exponential curves have become logarithmic.
- mook 2y ago
  If I'm reading the model correctly, that's comparing Intel machines to AMD machines. I'd imagine it makes sense that there are workloads that AMD does better than Intel (and hopefully vice versa). How do Dadsv6 compare?
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    Azure doesn't have Dadsv6 in Australia yet. Any year now... any year. Fundamentally, they're both x86 CPUs, both "high end server chips", both in nearly identical (maxed-out) configurations, etc... I just got used to computers getting so much faster over a three-year time period that it was almost pointless to benchmark them. The vendor hardly mattered, not within such a narrow market segment.
- jart 2y ago
  Sigmoid. That's the word you want.
kqr 2y ago
Given the strong prior pattern, I forecast this is due to (a) changes in methodology/non-random sampling, with 60 % probability, (b) random sampling effects that go away on longer timelines, with 20 % probability, (c) any actual change in CPUs, with 20 % probability. In my experience, when a metric shows weird behavious these are usually the reasons with roughly those proportions.
kqr 2y ago
I am somewhat surprised this has not happened earlier! In my circles there was a period around when the Eee PC and MacBook Air was new and manufacurers started cranking out ultra low power laptops that I felt we regressed in performance, but I suppose the majority of laptops sold were corporate things that didn't follow trends as closely.
hulitu 2y ago
> The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time Well, a lot of HN users care more about battery life than performance, so it shouldn't be any issue. /s After computers dumbed down (Android, iOS, Windows), we now have computers that do nothing. /s
reacweb 2y ago
A linear scale is no fit for a performance graph. Can we switch to a logarithm scale ?
dusted 2y ago
Interestingly, so did server cpu thread performance, I guess we're now starting to see more direct prioritization of core count versus core performance, which I kind of understand, it's superficially simpler to think about horizontal scaling, and for very many workloads, it's ideal, and for many it's at least doable, though I fear the invisible overhead in both compute and complexity
lynguist 2y ago
My hunch is that more people in countries like India use cpubenchmark / buy computers and try out cpubenchmark; and that in countries like those lower performing laptops outsell more powerful laptops by an enough large number that it shows. It doesn’t have to be literally India, it’s an example for illustration.
- baq 2y ago
  Or the ‘slow CPUs’ are actually truly Fast Enough. Intel N100 and N150 systems are low key amazing value.
  - bearjaws 2y ago
    I bought into the N100 hype train because of Reddit. Sure its an amazing value, but I hope anyone reading this isn't convinced it's remotely fast. I ended up going with a minisforum ryzen for about 2x the price and 4x the performance. I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.
    - baq 2y ago
      I got a 16GB RAM 512GB SSD N100 minipc for less than $150 last month. Yes it could be faster (always true for any computer), but I feel I got way more than I paid for. Certainly a much better deal than an RPi 5. PS. If you need more power than that I have a hard time coming up with a better deal than M4 Mac Mini, perhaps with some extra usb storage. It's possibly the only non-workstation computer that is worth buying in the not-inexpensive category (in the base version, obviously).
      - esperent 2y ago
        > it could be faster (always true for any computer) The question isn't whether it could be faster, but whether it's slow enough to be annoying for the tasks you use it for. I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing crazy things like opening a few programs at the same time.
Max-q 2y ago
Is the steep climb in 2021 due to Apple Silicon entering the scene? Or maybe not, servers seem to follow the same pattern. It’s a remarkable increase in performance on a short time.
Sweepi 2y ago
What also happened in the same time frame according to this website: - [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution - [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down - [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell So it comes down to: More old (ancient?) machines in the Dataset. Why? Unknown, but probably not indicating a trend regarding the hardware people use in the real World (TM) has changed. [1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html [2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html [3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html [from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]
- londons_explore 2y ago
  I feel like it could simply be that some big PC recycler, perhaps in a poorer nation reselling Windows Vista machines for $15 a pop, has decided to run this benchmark as part of their recycling process and it has skewed all the results.
  - silvestrov 2y ago
    For me it sounds more like cheap ChromeBooks because that is enough for most people's need. Very little in education needs more computing power than that. We've just told ourselves that computing power will always grow and that we will always need that growth. That might not be be true and computers might be like cars: we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer cars. Top speed no longer sells.
    - elif 2y ago
      Ehhh Having tried to install a modern Linux on a 2012 laptop, it simply is not as cozy as your memory records it. For reference even Linux designed for old hardware takes about 6 minutes to boot and even just using the console lags
esskay 2y ago
Not sure why this would be surprising. Even if we assume theres a bit of a skew because a recycler has run a bunch of benchmarks on old hardware, it's something that felt pretty inevitable. Average users dont need any more power than they have right now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been upgrading. There's been a large increase in low power machines, be it the N100's, portables such as the steam deck, etc. Until the next 'big thing' theres not going to be much of a need or desire to upgrade, you're not gaining anything at this point if your activities arent cpu constrained.
- friendzis 2y ago
  > Average users dont need any more power than they have right now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been upgrading. Even on what could easily be called a "beefy" machine major websites on chrome make snails look like avatars of agility.
curvaturearth 2y ago
Lots of laptops marketed as AI powered but have lower CPU speeds and total ram?
swiftcoder 2y ago
Do these graphs not include Macs at all? The text would suggest this to be true, but PassMark has existed in at least some form on Macs for a long time.
BoredPositron 2y ago
That happens every year after Christmas when old pcs hit the second hand market…
mikesabbagh 2y ago
most new software runs in the cloud. you only need the browser for many tasks. I even code in the cloud. for many people, why pay for something you dont need.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  Because people with this point of view infest us with Electron apps which need 100000x the processing power that took men to the moon in order to run a chat app.
MarkusWandel 2y ago
About time! Every bit of compute performance increase I've had personally, has been eaten up by software bloat. Admittedly as software goes to use 10x as much compute, it does get better, by maybe 10%, but the explosive increase in compute performance up to, say, the mid 2010s mostly just served to encourage bloat and obsolete older devices. My main machine is from about 2012 - a garage sale hand-me-down ultra high end game machine of the time (24GB in 2012!) It does suck a fair bit of power, running 24/7 but it's comfortably adequate for everything, and that's with two simultaneous users. Such hand-me-down laptops as have come my way (garage sales or free) are also adequate. So if the continuing evolution is, instead, in compute per per joule, rather than absolute compute, I'm all for it. Graphics card power connectors melting at 570W... not for me.
janaagaard 2y ago
These charts should be on a log scale.
segmondy 2y ago
My main desktop at home is a 2011 hp envy. I sometimes think of upgrading, but why? It works. my main laptop is a roughly 10yrs old thinkpad. Outside of macbooks, PCs haven't really given any reason to upgrade unless one is a hardcore gamer.
kittikitti 2y ago
Here's my thoughts, - The "Top CPU Performance to Date" has flatlined, so even if the hypothesis that developing countries are running PassMark is true, it doesn't explain everything. - The recent failures of high end Intel chips might be a factor. - This data is after the initial round of developers being replaced by AI and outsourcing. - PassMark doesn't include AI or ML benchmarks that the next generation hardware prioritizes. - CPU top clock speeds have been going down for more than a decade now, instead prioritizing the number of cores. - HPC labs are less likely to use PassMark because of licensing issues whereas free and open source alternatives exist. - The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference. Instagram is still limited to around 1000x1000 pixel images and at most 1080p video with 30 fps. Personally, this signals that PassMark is not a good benchmark because I've seen a significant increases in my applications from recent CPU improvements like with AMD's EPYC offerings.
fsckboy 2y ago
commoditization (i.e. enshittification) of computer hardware was taking place all through Moore's Reign, it was simply disguised and overwhelmed by all of Moore's "more".

311 points by doener 2y ago

but we got more battery life

Hyperthreading and speculative execution are going out of fashion? Now if we could just get rid of fake frames on the GPU side.

feifan 2y ago
I'd suspect some sort of economic factor, or sampling … e.g. just people with lower specs submitting and bringing down the average
johnnyanmac 2y ago
It just got introduced and NVDA needs to inflate its stock more. But yes, I agree on principle: https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58ef1de5e https://gist.github.com/bazhenovc/c0aa56cdf50df495fda84de58e...
utopcell 2y ago
Well, Intel abandoned hyperthreading with Lunar Lake, so it's definitely going out of fashion.
- esseph 2y ago
  For Intel, yes.

noizejoy 2y ago

Price increases due to multiple factors from higher interest rates to trade wars, etc. are tempering the financial enthusiasm of customers to buy at the higher end, maybe?

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

Moore's law crushed by capitalism? Does anyone else have a better explanation?

Gigachad 2y ago
Most likely explanation is that we are comparing 1 months worth of data for 2025 to the full years worth on previous years. The laptops people will have over 2025 haven't been purchased yet. I'd expect the chart to be basically flat for the year to date, but a tiny drop isn't particularly surprising either.
dgfitz 2y ago
I am super curious, if you’ll indulge me. What kind of economic policy would have let Moores law continue as it had been? Conversely, do you think Moores law would have been faster than 18? months if… someone else identified Moores law? Slower? Exist at all?
derkster 2y ago
Intel spend was spending upwards of 15% a quarter on stock buybacks, while also being stalled out on 10nm with the yield improvements "right around the corner", every quarter, for at least 18 months. I don't blame capitalism, but I do blame lack of regulation regarding stock buybacks, especially talking about the United States only home fab.
veltas 2y ago
Capitalism started Moore's law.

slyall 2y ago

Discussion from a day or so ago. 59 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43017612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43017612

RachelF 2y ago

I wonder why? Some possibilities: 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance? 2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions? 3. Fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities? 4. Most computers are now "fast enough" for the average user, no need to buy top end. 5. Intel's new CPUs are slower than the old ones

dehrmann 2y ago
4 has been true for over a decade.
- kome 2y ago
  i use a 10 years old macbook air and honestly i can do everything i need, statistics, light programming, browsing and photo editing. perfect. i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    I use a 10 years old macbook pro and the only thing I dislike is the battery life and the heat generated. I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now. Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Surely, the new MacBook Airs offer better performance than a 10 year old MacBook Pro. The M3 is very reasonable, 16GB/512GB for $1,100 or $1,300 for 15 inch I think. Could be going lower too with M4 MacBook Air purportedly releasing in Mar or Apr.
      - omnimus 2y ago
        I have cheapest air 8gig and its just fine for anything i do if i dont open 80tabs. But for sure wait for M4 as 16gig ram will be the base model. Coworker just got MacMini m4 and i dont see why that machine wouldnt be enough for 90% of people.

wiredfool 2y ago

As the chart is updated bi-weekly, but the data point that may change is for the current year. The first few days or weeks of a new year are less accurate compared to the end of a year.

moffkalast 2y ago
January 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123174954/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240123174954/https://www.cpube... January 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230130185431/https://www.cpube... Still, both previous years were notably up after the first month already. This is different and perhaps notable regardless. Either the release schedule is skewed forward or the hardware is genuinely stagnating. Or perhaps the benchmark is hitting some other CPU unrelated bottleneck.
- palijer 2y ago
  This is just still a sample size of three for a data period that is stated to be less accurate" not "has lower values" Just because the error isn't presented the same here doesn't mean it's error free...
- lolinder 2y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html http://web.archive.org/web/20240221001449/https://www.cpuben... They have more than twice as many samples on their Feb 10 update this year (47810) as they did last year on Feb 14 (22761). They have shown some growth year on year in sample size, but nowhere near doubling. That suggests this month has been an outlier in having a strangely large number of samples already, which could all be related—maybe their software started being bundled with a specific OEM or was featured on a popular content creator or whatever. As a sibling notes, less accurate just means less accurate, not necessarily skewed upward. There simply is less data to draw conclusions on than there will be later, so any medium-sized effect that adds 20k extra samples will have a larger effect now than later.

vladms 2y ago

People got smarter and buy only what they need?

ZiiS 2y ago

:shrug: CPU performance is a rounding error on your GPU and RAM bottlenecks.

Osiris 2y ago
The GPU being a bottleneck over the CPU is only in very specific scenarios. Can you be more specific about what message you're trying to convey?
- ZiiS 2y ago
  In the 90s and 00s paying more for CPU ment I could work faster. I was extreemly grateful for each breakthrough. Even in the 10s this wasn't really true. Storage and bandwith took a bigger slice and CPU was in abundance. We are now at the point I could easy serve the DB and App servers of a multi-million SaaS off my mobile phone. The few remaining areas where compute is still the bottleneck at all: video encoding, 3d rendering, mining, and predominantly now AI; also tend not to focuse on the CPU.

Osiris 2y ago

Looking at the top end chart, which flat lined, it seems that the biggest contributor would be a slower release cycle of the most performant chips. It looks like the score of the top end chips were dragging up the average. With the top spot not changing, the average is falling. I'm curious what median and std dev look like.

nxpnsv 2y ago

Arguably a majority of improvements in 2025 haven’t happened yet, seems premature to conclude anything in February.

varispeed 2y ago

Friend of mine bought Zephyrus G16 with Intel 185H and 32GB RAM. He thought this will help him studying and he chose it because some software he has to use is only available for Windows. He called me to have a look as the laptop has been sluggish for him. This thing barely can handle Office, Teams and the browser. Hot, noisy as hell and performance wise I see no difference over laptops from decade ago. Tragic. To be fair I don't think I could do anything. Task manager showed CPU as under utilised, yet fans were blasting, editing Word document looked like a slideshow. ASUS tools showed no problems. I don't know, feels like people are getting scammed with these new laptops. I still have M1 Max and never experienced anything like this.

truekonrads 2y ago
Uninstall all security except for Windows defender and see how it feels.
odo1242 2y ago
What were the disk specs? HDD or SSD? GPU? Windows is a heavy operating system compared to the others and can cause that problem but that likely isn't Windows alone causing the problem (though bloatware / other AV solutions could also have something to do with it)
- varispeed 2y ago
  1TB NVMe and 4060 GPU
iforgot22 2y ago
Sounds a lot like a dedicated GPU is running and heat-throttling the whole thing, since you don't see CPU usage. I wanted to say gaming laptops are a scam, but the older Intel MBPs with dedicated GPUs suffered too. More trouble than they're worth.
- varispeed 2y ago
  One thing I notice is that Google Drive was using 15% of ARC GPU (laptop also has nVidia 4060). When I shut down that process, it cooled down a bit after a while, but system is still sluggish and fans work all the time, even if I switched it to "Silent" mode.

bjourne 2y ago

Could it be related to world-wide inflation and decreasing real wages? Salaries have not kept up, hence people can't afford as powerful hardware as they used to. It also seems that top-of-the-line hardware don't depreciate as fast as it used to. Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, for example.

ekianjo 2y ago
> Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.
- ttt3ts 2y ago
  New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now. Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better than the 4090 in raster performance.
    - blangk 2y ago
      Yep. The whole fake frames thing seems like a witch hunt to me. If you can actually get a 5090 and were previously fully utilising a 3090 or 4090, it is a significant upgrade, as long as it doesn't burn your house down.
      - 7speter 2y ago
        I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd, even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once in a while.

walrus01 2y ago

I have a theory that cpu performance in laptops plateauing is something we'll see more of in the future, as manufacturers further optimize for battery life and being very thin. 15 years ago I wanted a very powerful MacBook pro. Now I'm fine with a MacBook air and if I need to do something that requires heavy lifting, I have remote access (ssh, vnc over ssh, etc) into a loud, beefy hypervisor located somewhere else with 512GB of RAM in it. On the consumer level and for non technical end users, as more functions are offloaded to "the cloud" with peoples' subscriptions to office365, Google workspace, iCloud, whatever, having a ton of cpu power in the laptop also isn't as necessary anymore. Along with things like h.265 and av1 video encode and decode being done with GPU assist rather than purely in software.

kelvinjps10 2y ago

I'm using a thinkpad t480 and it runs everything fine

nosioptar 2y ago
My favorite computer is my t530. It's showing its age a bit, but the newer thinkpads I've used all feel like a step down quality wise I'll probably use the t530 as my primary machine for years to come.

layer8 2y ago

The chart also shows that single-thread performance hasn’t improved that much in the past twelve or so years, compared to Moore’s law. And this is compounded by Wirth’s law [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

jamesy0ung 2y ago
It's always interesting when I install Linux on a machine, and it can fit all running processes on a single page in top.

altairprime 2y ago

It’s remarkable how carefully the page is worded to not incorporate Apple’s desktop and mobile CPU performance changes over time - but they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn’t exclude Apple Silicon like it used to thanks to Asahi.

talldayo 2y ago
Ultimately Apple has hit the same dead end too. Their designs and TSMC's processes aren't putting Moore's law back on the map, you can see it in the year-over-year performance. If tariffs end up hitting any harder, Apple can't just go to TSMC's Arizona plant and get faster silicon than what Taiwan has today. > they screwed up because they said Linux, which doesn’t exclude Apple Silicon In the context of the second graph, that means Apple Silicon is also failing to push the envelope forwards.
- altairprime 2y ago
  Apple has one advantage that PCs do not: each silicon release cycle is accompanied by a coordinated operating system and compiler release for CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads; so that they can hardware-accelerate functions inside the operating system and programs compiled to target the hardware far more rapidly than the PC industry. I remember a tweet from a couple years ago where the hardware-accelerated IPC calls for a system-wide performance gain (and thus a latency reduction slash benchmark improvement) of several percent within one of those year-long intervals — but such gains would be invisible to Linux, even Asahi, because it would require libc and kernel adaptations for different hardware generations, as well as reverse engineering those adaptations from the various macOS kernels and frameworks each year. I don’t think all of those gains can be measured relative to PCs at all, as there may not be any comparable equivalent of what’s being accelerated for PCs to measure — but it still stands out that they simply chose not to mention Apple at all, when they could have theoretically shown either the same slowdown or lack thereof in that domain now that multiple generations are available for easy testing.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    That's neither a new concept, nor unique to Apple. GCC and LLVM are both regularly updated by AMD and Intel who also optimize and patch their own microcode as well. When you compile the Linux kernel, and moreover Linux software, you will be doing it with the optimizations of your chosen architecture. For x86 that means OEMs provide optimizations for stuff like AVX and SSE, whereas Apple works in their equivalent proprietary frameworks like Accelerate. You can credit Apple (or more accurately, Lattner) with starting the trend, but Linux can be compiled using the same LLVM backend MacOS uses with whatever optimizations your OEM supports. > I remember a tweet from a couple years ago where the hardware-accelerated IPC calls for a system-wide performance gain Most kernels aren't bottlenecked by IPC throughput like XNU is. A modern Linux system might need IPC for dbus, a few journaling systems and systemd. Apple's entire kernel relies on the throughput of a message queue, so feasibly speeding that up matters quite a lot.

markhahn 2y ago

average reflects the population, of course. max graph shows no such fall - laptops going up even. how about this interpretation: desktops are fast enough; laptops are getting faster but people tend to buy more usable laptops, not faster ones.

zabzonk 2y ago

Could not get to the page. But, I dunno. I just bought an Asus Zenbook with an intel 9 ultra with Arc graphics 32Gb ram, 1tb SSD, and it seems pretty nifty to me, especially at the price.

dietr1ch 2y ago
so 9 is fast? The rest of the specs are not CPU. My i7-13700H is shitting the bed due to poor software. Permanently on power-saving while charging because of "rapid charging". It'd be ok if it didn't render the whole computer useless at 400MHz, my first computer from circa 1996 is the only one clocked slower than that I ever had, and it had a turbo button
- zabzonk 2y ago
  > The rest of the specs are not CPU Fair enuf. I was really trying to comment on the ultra/arc chip performance. > so 9 is fast? seems to be - my previous laptop was a Core i7, and my new 9 Ultra one is definitely faster (for what I do with it). It goes into power saving only when it gets below about 30% of battery charge, and Asus give a lot of switches to fiddle about with that.

zeroq 2y ago

Some 15 years ago I was playing DOTA on what you'd call today a gaming laptop (HP HDX9200) which would occasionally overheat causing BSOD and everytime it happened it was hail mary, because the boot time took around 5 minutes and it was the exact time for servers to flag me as leaver and ban me from future games. These days I have two main machines which boot to Windows in about a minute. Somehow I remember my old 486 machine was able to boot to DOS within the snap of a power button.

aboardRat4 2y ago

My experience with recent hardware is that it is very poorly designed, not as "computational hardware", but as a "consumer product". Buying anything new for me is out of question since a few years ago, because it just cannot be guaranteed to survive half a year, hence now I always buy second-hand, because this way at least it was tested by the previous owner. But even so, modern hardware is hellishly unreliable. I bought a Dell 7 series laptop (17 inches), and: 1. Already had to replace the battery back panel three times, just because it is being held by tiny plastic hooks which are easily torn away. 2. It's assembly-reassembly process is a nightmare (which used to not be the case for Dell in the past). 3. Already had to replace the fans (the laptop is not even 5 years old). but bear with me, the rest is more fun: 4. When running with a smaller battery (official), it CANNOT RUN THE GPU AT FULL SPEED EVEN WHEN PLUGGED INTO THE MAINS. Really? This is just ridiculous. A laptop using the battery when plugged in is just insane. 5. You MUST use a smaller battery to install a 2.5" SATA drive. So you much choose: either a SATA drive, or a GPU. 6. The power on/off button does not work if your BIOS battery has low charge. This is just maddening! What is the connection? Maybe it's just me and one single laptop? Well, in my experience, everything is getting similarly fragile. My phone has its thermal sensor installed ON THE BATTERY, so if you replace the battery, you have to replace the sensor as well, which is, oh, well, a harder thing to manufacture than a battery and on many non-official batteries always returns 0 (0 Kelvin that is, -273 Centigrade). The amount of cacti you have to swallow to get used to modern hardware is just staggering.

jiggawatts 2y ago

Even in data centres, I'm starting to see performance regressions: I just benchmarked the recently released Azure Ddsv6/Edsv6 series of virtual machines, and in several metrics they're slower than the Dadsv5/Eadsv5 series that are more than three years older! IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The exponential curves have become logarithmic.

mook 2y ago
If I'm reading the model correctly, that's comparing Intel machines to AMD machines. I'd imagine it makes sense that there are workloads that AMD does better than Intel (and hopefully vice versa). How do Dadsv6 compare?
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Azure doesn't have Dadsv6 in Australia yet. Any year now... any year. Fundamentally, they're both x86 CPUs, both "high end server chips", both in nearly identical (maxed-out) configurations, etc... I just got used to computers getting so much faster over a three-year time period that it was almost pointless to benchmark them. The vendor hardly mattered, not within such a narrow market segment.
jart 2y ago
Sigmoid. That's the word you want.

kqr 2y ago

Given the strong prior pattern, I forecast this is due to (a) changes in methodology/non-random sampling, with 60 % probability, (b) random sampling effects that go away on longer timelines, with 20 % probability, (c) any actual change in CPUs, with 20 % probability. In my experience, when a metric shows weird behavious these are usually the reasons with roughly those proportions.

kqr 2y ago

I am somewhat surprised this has not happened earlier! In my circles there was a period around when the Eee PC and MacBook Air was new and manufacurers started cranking out ultra low power laptops that I felt we regressed in performance, but I suppose the majority of laptops sold were corporate things that didn't follow trends as closely.

hulitu 2y ago

> The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time Well, a lot of HN users care more about battery life than performance, so it shouldn't be any issue. /s After computers dumbed down (Android, iOS, Windows), we now have computers that do nothing. /s

reacweb 2y ago

A linear scale is no fit for a performance graph. Can we switch to a logarithm scale ?

dusted 2y ago

Interestingly, so did server cpu thread performance, I guess we're now starting to see more direct prioritization of core count versus core performance, which I kind of understand, it's superficially simpler to think about horizontal scaling, and for very many workloads, it's ideal, and for many it's at least doable, though I fear the invisible overhead in both compute and complexity

lynguist 2y ago

My hunch is that more people in countries like India use cpubenchmark / buy computers and try out cpubenchmark; and that in countries like those lower performing laptops outsell more powerful laptops by an enough large number that it shows. It doesn’t have to be literally India, it’s an example for illustration.

baq 2y ago
Or the ‘slow CPUs’ are actually truly Fast Enough. Intel N100 and N150 systems are low key amazing value.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  I bought into the N100 hype train because of Reddit. Sure its an amazing value, but I hope anyone reading this isn't convinced it's remotely fast. I ended up going with a minisforum ryzen for about 2x the price and 4x the performance. I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.
  - baq 2y ago
    I got a 16GB RAM 512GB SSD N100 minipc for less than $150 last month. Yes it could be faster (always true for any computer), but I feel I got way more than I paid for. Certainly a much better deal than an RPi 5. PS. If you need more power than that I have a hard time coming up with a better deal than M4 Mac Mini, perhaps with some extra usb storage. It's possibly the only non-workstation computer that is worth buying in the not-inexpensive category (in the base version, obviously).
    - esperent 2y ago
      > it could be faster (always true for any computer) The question isn't whether it could be faster, but whether it's slow enough to be annoying for the tasks you use it for. I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing crazy things like opening a few programs at the same time.

Max-q 2y ago

Is the steep climb in 2021 due to Apple Silicon entering the scene? Or maybe not, servers seem to follow the same pattern. It’s a remarkable increase in performance on a short time.

Sweepi 2y ago

What also happened in the same time frame according to this website: - [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution - [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down - [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell So it comes down to: More old (ancient?) machines in the Dataset. Why? Unknown, but probably not indicating a trend regarding the hardware people use in the real World (TM) has changed. [1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html [2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html [3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html [from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]

londons_explore 2y ago
I feel like it could simply be that some big PC recycler, perhaps in a poorer nation reselling Windows Vista machines for $15 a pop, has decided to run this benchmark as part of their recycling process and it has skewed all the results.
- silvestrov 2y ago
  For me it sounds more like cheap ChromeBooks because that is enough for most people's need. Very little in education needs more computing power than that. We've just told ourselves that computing power will always grow and that we will always need that growth. That might not be be true and computers might be like cars: we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer cars. Top speed no longer sells.
  - elif 2y ago
    Ehhh Having tried to install a modern Linux on a 2012 laptop, it simply is not as cozy as your memory records it. For reference even Linux designed for old hardware takes about 6 minutes to boot and even just using the console lags

esskay 2y ago

Not sure why this would be surprising. Even if we assume theres a bit of a skew because a recycler has run a bunch of benchmarks on old hardware, it's something that felt pretty inevitable. Average users dont need any more power than they have right now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been upgrading. There's been a large increase in low power machines, be it the N100's, portables such as the steam deck, etc. Until the next 'big thing' theres not going to be much of a need or desire to upgrade, you're not gaining anything at this point if your activities arent cpu constrained.

friendzis 2y ago
> Average users dont need any more power than they have right now for their common activities (browsing and such), so havent been upgrading. Even on what could easily be called a "beefy" machine major websites on chrome make snails look like avatars of agility.

curvaturearth 2y ago

Lots of laptops marketed as AI powered but have lower CPU speeds and total ram?

swiftcoder 2y ago

Do these graphs not include Macs at all? The text would suggest this to be true, but PassMark has existed in at least some form on Macs for a long time.

BoredPositron 2y ago

That happens every year after Christmas when old pcs hit the second hand market…

mikesabbagh 2y ago

most new software runs in the cloud. you only need the browser for many tasks. I even code in the cloud. for many people, why pay for something you dont need.

4gotunameagain 2y ago
Because people with this point of view infest us with Electron apps which need 100000x the processing power that took men to the moon in order to run a chat app.

MarkusWandel 2y ago

About time! Every bit of compute performance increase I've had personally, has been eaten up by software bloat. Admittedly as software goes to use 10x as much compute, it does get better, by maybe 10%, but the explosive increase in compute performance up to, say, the mid 2010s mostly just served to encourage bloat and obsolete older devices. My main machine is from about 2012 - a garage sale hand-me-down ultra high end game machine of the time (24GB in 2012!) It does suck a fair bit of power, running 24/7 but it's comfortably adequate for everything, and that's with two simultaneous users. Such hand-me-down laptops as have come my way (garage sales or free) are also adequate. So if the continuing evolution is, instead, in compute per per joule, rather than absolute compute, I'm all for it. Graphics card power connectors melting at 570W... not for me.

janaagaard 2y ago

These charts should be on a log scale.

segmondy 2y ago

My main desktop at home is a 2011 hp envy. I sometimes think of upgrading, but why? It works. my main laptop is a roughly 10yrs old thinkpad. Outside of macbooks, PCs haven't really given any reason to upgrade unless one is a hardcore gamer.

kittikitti 2y ago

Here's my thoughts, - The "Top CPU Performance to Date" has flatlined, so even if the hypothesis that developing countries are running PassMark is true, it doesn't explain everything. - The recent failures of high end Intel chips might be a factor. - This data is after the initial round of developers being replaced by AI and outsourcing. - PassMark doesn't include AI or ML benchmarks that the next generation hardware prioritizes. - CPU top clock speeds have been going down for more than a decade now, instead prioritizing the number of cores. - HPC labs are less likely to use PassMark because of licensing issues whereas free and open source alternatives exist. - The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference. Instagram is still limited to around 1000x1000 pixel images and at most 1080p video with 30 fps. Personally, this signals that PassMark is not a good benchmark because I've seen a significant increases in my applications from recent CPU improvements like with AMD's EPYC offerings.

fsckboy 2y ago

commoditization (i.e. enshittification) of computer hardware was taking place all through Moore's Reign, it was simply disguised and overwhelmed by all of Moore's "more".