Guidance on choosing CPUs

This is a short guide covering some issues concerning modern CPU performance and how to choose the best CPU.

Single threaded performance

Historically Single threaded performance improved steadily year on year, the '80s and '90s saw cpu performance double every 18-20 months. until the mid 2000s when it seems that chip design hit a number of limits (heat dissipation, die size...) which effectively stalled CPU speeds at around 3Ghz. Since then CPU development has largely concentrated on hypertrheading and multicore designs.

Core density

Clock speed

References

-- IainRae - 03 Aug 2014