Published 14 April, 2020; last updated 26 October, 2020
From 2006 – 2020, Geekbench score per CPU price has grown by around 16% a year, for rates that would yield an order of magnitude over roughly 16 years.
We looked at Geekbench 5,1 a benchmark for CPU performance. We combined Geekbench’s multi-core scores on its ‘Processor Benchmarks’ page2 with release dates and prices that we scraped from Wikichip and Wikipedia.3 All our data and plots can be found here.4 We then calculated score per dollar and adjusted for inflation using the consumer price index.5 For every year, we calculated the 95th percentile score per dollar. We then fit linear and exponential trendlines to those scores.
Figure 1 shows all our data for Geekbench score per CPU price.
The data is well-described by a linear or an exponential trendline. Assuming an exponential trend,6 Geekbench score per CPU price grew by around 16% per year between 2006 and 2020, a rate that would yield a factor of ten every 16 years.7
This is a markedly slower growth rate than those observed for CPU price performance trends in the past, however since it is for a different performance metric to any used earlier, it is unclear how similar one should expect them to be– from 1940 to 2008, Sandberg and Bostrom found that CPU price performance grew by a factor of ten every 5.6 years when measured in MIPS per dollar, and by a factor of ten every 7.7 years when measured in FLOPS per dollar.8
Primary author: Asya Bergal