File:Growth in processor performance, 1978–2010.png

English: "Figure 1.1 Growth in processor performance since the late 1970s. This chart plots performance relative to the VAX

11/780 as measured by the SPEC benchmarks (see Section 1.8). Prior to the mid-1980s, processor performance growth was largely technology driven and averaged about 25% per year. The increase in growth to about 52% since then is attributable to more advanced architectural and organizational ideas. By 2003, this growth led to a difference in performance of about a factor of 25 versus if we had continued at the 25% rate. Performance for floating-point-ori- ented calculations has increased even faster. Since 2003, the limits of power and available instruction-level parallel- ism have slowed uniprocessor performance, to no more than 22% per year, or about 5 times slower than had we continued at 52% per year. (The fastest SPEC performance since 2007 has had automatic parallelization turned on with increasing number of cores per chip each year, so uniprocessor speed is harder to gauge. These results are lim- ited to single-socket systems to reduce the impact of automatic parallelization.) Figure 1.11 on page 24 shows the improvement in clock rates for these same three eras. Since SPEC has changed over the years, performance of newer machines is estimated by a scaling factor that relates the performance for two different versions of SPEC (e.g.,

SPEC89, SPEC92, SPEC95, SPEC2000, and SPEC2006)."