Depending on what you mean by processing performance, the increases did slow down, significantly, around 2004-2005. At least for non-numerical single-threaded

Depending on what you mean by processing performance, the increases did slow down, significantly, around 2004-2005. At least for non-numerical single-threaded workloads. Had they continued at the same rate, CPU performance would be anywhere between 5 to 10X higher today. This is a commonly used motivation for a lot of modern computer architecture research, here's one such plot: http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/ http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/