A 33 MHz 486 to 200 MHz was about 5 years. A 8 MHz 286 was released 7 years before that, right at the start of the uptick. Before that a MOS IC was generally capped at about 5 MHz while people slowly figured out how to shrink them and developed EDA tools that allowed designed to scale quickly across processes.
Dennard scaling was a wild ride while it lasted, but it's been done for more than a decade now.
But I think it was not great on 16-bit code or something. The boost was not as impressive for DOS and Windows (still had lots of 16-bit code at the time).
I bought my Pentium Pro + motherboard and RAM at a computer show for ~$1000. This was a fairly good purchase. Around the same time I also bought an HP CD burner for around $1000- big mistake since it was slow and the prices soon plummeted.
We had a similar jump going from the 486 to the Pentium. I distinctly recall a Linux kernel compile being a 45-60 minute adventure on a 486DX2-66, but only 5 minutes on a Pentium 100. (I felt like a lot of elements of PC architecture improved together around that time as well.)
Pentium was not that much faster than 486 - 486DX4-133 was faster than Pentium 90. I guess it had more memory
This also describes VLIW architectures more generally, and even more so wrt. current speculative developments like Mill, which AIUI doesn't even have a single, standardized "machine-level" assembly; what the machine runs at its lowest level is only defined by your actual chip configuration. (It is understood that GPU compute works much the same way, with the GPU driver acting as a "compiler" of sorts.)
Actually that's on Apple, the manufacturer, for choosing to undercool these chips (probably thinking that most people won't care, which I tend to agree with, but it's problematic when the machine is sold as a "Pro" device).
Anecdotal comparison, my Thinkpad sustains its 4 GHz for hours on end no problem. There's no comparing the performance of these i7 / R7 with decade-old dual cores at 2 gigs, it's just unfair.
I’m so tired of this trope. Do you think there’s a single definition of Pro and it’s yours?
Having said that, my 15" MBP is sufficient for my needs, but I'd not recommend it for anyone doing heavy numeric lifting. Or compiling large volumes of code.
I expect to be able to compile moderately sized software, transcode an hour long video, render a scene in a ray tracer, etc without throttling.
I can do these things on my Dell XPS developer edition. If I'm going to spend more than $1000 on a machine, these capabilities are a minimum standard.
My $200 netbook hits thermal throttling and that's ok. It's not "pro" and it isn't meant to be.
The short version is that MacBook is not designed for speed/performance but looks. It overheats by default.
2700k could reach/overclock to 4.5Ghz w/o much trouble, given proper cooling - 2011. The reason for lower base clock is the Intel TDP definition.
The Pentium Pro, released in late 1995, was a 3-way design clocking up to 200 MHz. It was surprisingly competitive. It had all the modern requirements: out of order execution, out of order memory pipeline, on board L1 and L2 caches. It just had less resources in each dimension. Intel caught up to 500 MHz in 1999, with the PIII. That was still a 3-day design. Intel’s first four way design was the Core 2 in 2006. That could hold 96 instructions in flight. Intel didn’t release a CPU with two load store units until 2011 (Sandy Bridge could do two loads per cycle) or possibly 2019 (Sunny Cove was the first that could do two stores per cycle).
Obviously, Intel caught up based on a combination of features long before then. I’d guess around early 2000s, when clock speed hit 1 GHz+. Clock for clock, the Pentium Pro wasn’t actually that much slower than Alpha on integer code. It took much longer for intel to be competitive on floating point code.
(By the way, it blows my mind that we went from 200 MHz to 1 GHz in about 4 years. Meanwhile, it’s been 15 years since my first 2 GHz+ MacBook, and a new MacBook still has a base clock around that range. Maybe it’ll turbo boost to 4 GHz for 10 seconds before it exceeds its thermal envelope.)