So my question is this, if all modern day computer CPUs (central processing units) more or less have the same or similar clockspeeds from generation to generation as of late, and all run on a 64 bit architecture with an x86 instruction set, what about the processor is being altered or changed to yield performance gains from one gen to the next?
I understand that more cache is available, and transistor sizes are getting smaller and smaller, but at the end of the day, it is still running an x86 instruction set at 64 bits.
So last gens 4 core 4.5 GHz processor should run identically as quickly as a current gen 4 core 4.5 GHz processor theoretically – but that is not the case.
In: Technology
One thing to add to this answer is that the semiconductor processes used to manufacture these things have gotten a lot better at making really tiny transistors. So N times reduction in feature size leads to an N^2 reduction in area. Now, for the same amount of area, you can play around with chip architectures that increase throughput, such as parallelism. So now we can fit even more cores in a CPU than we could twenty or even ten years ago. So with more cores, we can execute more instructions in the same clock cycle.
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