I mean, it definitely isn’t the 90’s anymore, for sure.
But I don’t think that chart tells the whole story. First off, it only shows half of the last ten years. Things feel like they’ve been picking up a little bit, with Apple and AMD executing fairly well. Second, average is being dragged down a bit as thin-and-light laptops have become very popular. A lot of the chips in that chart could probably be run faster on a higher energy budget, right?
The trendlines have continued, with only minor increases to single-threaded performance. They're looking at high-end datacenter CPUs, so laptops are not dragging down the average. More energy doesn't help you too much because you start to burn up the chip.
The core counts shown seemed grossly wrong (low) to me in all respects, from desktops to laptops to high end datacenter CPUs, so I looked into the assumptions.
The chart is from the perpective of CPUs going into HPC clusters, not high end SMP database servers in more commercial datacenters. The industry did have more than one core before 2004. The dataset author's 2016 blog explains "Similarly, I only consider CPUs for dual socket machines" [like Xeon Phi].
I'm not sure, given the HPC orientation why the dataset author didn't show specFP rather than specInt... but if I had to pick one, I'd also pick SpecInt.
But I don’t think that chart tells the whole story. First off, it only shows half of the last ten years. Things feel like they’ve been picking up a little bit, with Apple and AMD executing fairly well. Second, average is being dragged down a bit as thin-and-light laptops have become very popular. A lot of the chips in that chart could probably be run faster on a higher energy budget, right?