> Skylake (2016) and Sandy Bridge (2010) have roughly comparable single core desktop benchmarks. That's not quite true -- Intel aims for a big IPC (instruction

> Skylake (2016) and Sandy Bridge (2010) have roughly comparable single core desktop benchmarks. That's not quite true -- Intel aims for a big IPC (instructions/clock) improvement for each "tock" generation (Nehalem -> Sandy Bridge -> Haswell -> Skylake), and IIRC has pretty much delivered. Some benchmarks are really hard to push because they're memory/cache-miss bound (so it's really just about throwing in more memory channels and clocking them up), but a lot of things have gotten seriously better for tricky integer code, especially in e.g. branch prediction/uop cache in the frontend and available execution ports in the backend.