Actually, I was rounding a bit. My original post on the subject indicated
that the span for x86 comparisons was Nov 2000 thru June 2006 (as I was
trying to use roughly the same period as in the post I was responding to
at
the time), and the increase was from 5.8 to 63.6, so the numbers should be
a
7.95x increase in just over 5 1/2 years.
Sorry, but this kind of comparison is complete rubbish. Since the upper
bound is the speed of an electron, then clearly the closer one gets to that
speed the smaller the incremental improvement. Correspondingly, the only
way to achieve large increases in chip speed is to have large gains to make.
Any other increases in speed will become dependent on architecture, in which
case to discuss chips alone is fundamentally meaningless.
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