> It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed
I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes.
Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory, peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same upgrade.
I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes.
Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory, peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same upgrade.