Anandtech has a nice analysis of the progression of CPUs over the last 9 years: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-core-i74770k-i54560k

Anandtech has a nice analysis of the progression of CPUs over the last 9 years: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-core-i74770k-i54560k-tested/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-... Depending on what you're doing with CPUs there have been improvements, even at the high end between Nehalem and Haswell (on the Intel side). Anandtech's data shows a nearly 2x improvement between those generations for certain tasks. But the reality is that for other tasks (e.g. the winrar compression benchmark) the speedup is minimal compared to previous years (see Haswell vs Prescott). In many cases where there is a speedup, performance is already so good that you wouldn't notice. It's pretty crazy to see that in the consumer world, not even games are demanding so much performance from our CPUs.