CPUs aren’t getting faster clock speeds and they aren’t getting more cores. How are they improving in performance?
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There’s a lot of pieces to performance. Cache is another piece, you can increase the cache or the bus speed to the processor so it can fetch the already calculated result and return it quicker than doing the calculation again. L1, L2 and L3 cache can be tweaked as L1 cache is on the dye of the chip and L2, L3 is external to the chip. (Stands for Layer1, Layer2, Layer3)
Instruction Sets are improving also. Instruction sets are, an ELI5 answer, ways of doing calculations that are predictable to improve performance. A lot of the newest instruction sets revolve around virtualization and wouldn’t necessarily be applicable in a desktop/laptop CPU.
Other improvements are reducing what the CPU is doing. For example, offloading network IO to a dedicated chip is better than piping it back to the CPU in order to do the calculations. If you can free up the cycles on the CPU by offloading calculations to other components (Memory Bus, RAID Controllers, Network cards, Video Cards, etc) this improves performance also.
Lots of tricks that a lot of smart people have figured out. You’re only scratching the surface with this question on the technology that has been invented in the last 20 years for improvements in performance for our modern day computers. 🙂
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