Mac Hardware Trends (1984-2022)

[ahurst]

Not sure if this is the right sub-forum for this, but since it's the closest thing MacRumors has to a "general Mac" forum, here goes:

A few week ago, I got curious about the rates of change in computer specs over time. I've felt for ages that the rate of spec increases in desktop/laptop hardware has slowed significantly in the past 10 years (for Macs and PCs alike), but I wondered whether that was actually supported by data. Since there are data sources that have detailed records of the specs for every Mac ever made, I decided to try and wrangle and plot that data in R to see what showed up.

Here's the base RAM for all Mac models over time, from 1984 to present (note that the Y axis is on a log scale):

As you can see, there's a steady rate of increase until the early 2010's, where it starts to level off.

For comparison, here's the maximum RAM for those same models, which is a little more linear (especially thanks to the new Mac Pros):

Interestingly, this one seems to jump and plateau every decade or so (128 MB from ~1985 to ~1993, 2 GB from ~1996 to ~2003, etc.)

Finally, here's the base storage capacity over time, with the colours of the points indicating the type of storage (HDD, SDD, or Fusion):

With this one, you can see how drive capacity increases slowed a bit during 2000-2010 and have pretty much plateaued since 2010.

Anyway, the dataset I've got is pretty comprehensive, and has everything from original MRSP data (for most models) to Geekbench scores. Are there any other visualizations of Macs over time people want to see?

Also, to be clear: this isn't an "Apple fell off" post since Macs have more-or-less kept pace with the broader PC industry (especially during the Intel years). I just think it's interesting to look at these trends over time!

 

[jackoverfull]

Fascinating, thank you.

 

[Juicy Box]

Geekbench scores

I have no data to support it, but it seems like from my own personal observations and experiences, that processing power was steadily increasing from when I start using Macs in the mid 90's, until around the 2012-2013 Mac models, and seemed to have leveled off.

For example, every generation of chip used in the Macs seemed to have a decent gain in performance, until around 2012 when after that, the gains were not significant. Like the 3rd generation i7 in the Late 2012 iMac versus the 4th generation i7 in the Late 2013 iMac for example.

It appears the year to year gains were pretty insignificant, even up to the original M1 chip.

Again, this is just based off of my own experience and observations.

 

[ahurst]

I have no data to support it, but it seems like from my own personal observations and experiences, that processing power was steadily increasing from when I start using Macs in the mid 90's, until around the 2012-2013 Mac models, and seemed to have leveled off.

For example, every generation of chip used in the Macs seemed to have a decent gain in performance, until around 2012 when after that, the gains were not significant. Like the 3rd generation i7 in the Late 2012 iMac versus the 4th generation i7 in the Late 2013 iMac for example.

It appears the year to year gains were pretty insignificant, even up to the original M1 chip.

Again, this is just based off of my own experience and observations.

That's my gut instinct too, and definitely something I want to look at! The main roadblock is that there's no common benchmark for Macs from 1999 to 2022 (PPC macs only run GeekBench 2), so I'll first need to try and correlate GB scores from different versions to make sure they roughly scale the same, and then I'll need to use that to create a common benchmark score for all OSX-capable Macs.

 

[jackoverfull]

I had more or less the same impression (not about apple silicon though, if you take in consideration chips in the same ballpark), would be great to see some empirical evidence.

 

[ahurst]

I have no data to support it, but it seems like from my own personal observations and experiences, that processing power was steadily increasing from when I start using Macs in the mid 90's, until around the 2012-2013 Mac models, and seemed to have leveled off.

Okay, so this is missing all post-Mojave Macs since this is Geekbench 2 (and seems to be missing quite a few pre-Mojave ones as well), but here's a rough plot of Geekbench 2 (32-bit) scores over time, colour-coded by CPU architecture (again, log-scaled Y-axis):

Take this with a grain of salt, since there are plenty of things newer processors are tuned for (e.g. machine learning, video decoding) that Geekbench 2 doesn't test for, and Geekbench 2 might have unknown performance issues with recent macOS. That aside, it looks like you're right: steady gains in the PowerPC and Core 2 Duo eras, a huge bump with the Core i-series in the early 2010's, and then a sort of levelling out in the following years.

Would be interesting to break this down into product class (laptop, desktop, workstation). I'm working on a similar plot for Geekbench 5 (covering Intel and Apple Silicon Macs), though there's a fair bit of missing values in the database to fix up first).

 

[Adarna]

Not sure if this is the right sub-forum for this, but since it's the closest thing MacRumors has to a "general Mac" forum, here goes:

A few week ago, I got curious about the rates of change in computer specs over time. I've felt for ages that the rate of spec increases in desktop/laptop hardware has slowed significantly in the past 10 years (for Macs and PCs alike), but I wondered whether that was actually supported by data. Since there are data sources that have detailed records of the specs for every Mac ever made, I decided to try and wrangle and plot that data in R to see what showed up.

Here's the base RAM for all Mac models over time, from 1984 to present (note that the Y axis is on a log scale):View attachment 1961376
As you can see, there's a steady rate of increase until the early 2010's, where it starts to level off.

For comparison, here's the maximum RAM for those same models, which is a little more linear (especially thanks to the new Mac Pros):
View attachment 1961377
Interestingly, this one seems to jump and plateau every decade or so (128 MB from ~1985 to ~1993, 2 GB from ~1996 to ~2003, etc.)

Finally, here's the base storage capacity over time, with the colours of the points indicating the type of storage (HDD, SDD, or Fusion):
View attachment 1961378
With this one, you can see how drive capacity increases slowed a bit during 2000-2010 and have pretty much plateaued since 2010.

Anyway, the dataset I've got is pretty comprehensive, and has everything from original MRSP data (for most models) to Geekbench scores. Are there any other visualizations of Macs over time people want to see?

Also, to be clear: this isn't an "Apple fell off" post since Macs have more-or-less kept pace with the broader PC industry (especially during the Intel years). I just think it's interesting to look at these trends over time!

I saw a IBM report on storage space from r/DataHoarder

For consumer SSD it's up to 8TB. Any bigger and its for commercial use already.

The limiting factor for base storage and base memory would be the target price of the base models.

If say $100 of memory only gets 8GB then 8GB it remains until such a time that memory becomes cheaper.

For storage Apple's focused on throughput rather than capacity.

Apple assumes that all end users are going to edit the next 4K commercial using a base model Mac.

I'd love Apple to allow 1TB 0.6-1GB/s SSD for $100/TB

 

[jackoverfull]

Okay, so this is missing all post-Mojave Macs since this is Geekbench 2 (and seems to be missing quite a few pre-Mojave ones as well), but here's a rough plot of Geekbench 2 (32-bit) scores over time, colour-coded by CPU architecture (again, log-scaled Y-axis):

View attachment 1961428
Take this with a grain of salt, since there are plenty of things newer processors are tuned for (e.g. machine learning, video decoding) that Geekbench 2 doesn't test for, and Geekbench 2 might have unknown performance issues with recent macOS. That aside, it looks like you're right: steady gains in the PowerPC and Core 2 Duo eras, a huge bump with the Core i-series in the early 2010's, and then a sort of levelling out in the following years.

Would be interesting to break this down into product class (laptop, desktop, workstation). I'm working on a similar plot for Geekbench 5 (covering Intel and Apple Silicon Macs), though there's a fair bit of missing values in the database to fix up first).

Well done, thank you.

I saw a IBM report on storage space from r/DataHoarder

For consumer SSD it's up to 8TB. Any bigger and its for commercial use already.

The limiting factor for base storage and base memory would be the target price of the base models.

If say $100 of memory only gets 8GB then 8GB it remains until such a time that memory becomes cheaper.

For storage Apple's focused on throughput rather than capacity.

Apple assumes that all end users are going to edit the next 4K commercial using a base model Mac.

I'd love Apple to allow 1TB 0.6-1GB/s SSD for $100/TB

Yes, the switch to SSDs was the cause of the levelling in capacity, now that they are mostly catching up it will likely start to increase faster again.

 

[ahurst]

I saw a IBM report on storage space from r/DataHoarder

For consumer SSD it's up to 8TB. Any bigger and its for commercial use already.

The limiting factor for base storage and base memory would be the target price of the base models.

If say $100 of memory only gets 8GB then 8GB it remains until such a time that memory becomes cheaper.

Apart from cost, I'd say another factor in RAM stagnation is that the resource demands of software and OSes has grown a lot less in the last 10 years than they did between, say, 1990 and 2000, or 2000 and 2010.

My guess is that the explosion of smartphones was an important factor here: instead of desktops/laptops being only platform to target, web developers and software framework engineers from ~2008 on had to also make sure their code ran on RAM and CPU-limited mobile devices. Lower RAM demands from software == less need for more RAM capacity year-over-year.

 

[Adarna]

Apart from cost, I'd say another factor in RAM stagnation is that the resource demands of software and OSes has grown a lot less in the last 10 years than they did between, say, 1990 and 2000, or 2000 and 2010.

My guess is that the explosion of smartphones was an important factor here: instead of desktops/laptops being only platform to target, web developers and software framework engineers from ~2008 on had to also make sure their code ran on RAM and CPU-limited mobile devices. Lower RAM demands from software == less need for more RAM capacity year-over-year.

Globally ~1.3 billion smartphones were shipped in 2021.

Same period... PC desktop/laptop only had less than 300 million.

Any which way iPhone & Android drove the R&D for a lot of tech improvements.

Intel was stuck on 14nm when Apple entered 5nm and Android started with 7nm.

Sony mirrorless cameras wouldnt have as good dynamic range or light sensitivity without smartphone camera R&D money.

This made surveillance cameras have 2K, 4K and higher res image sensosrs.

 

[MBAir2010]

I have no data to support it, but it seems like from my own personal observations and experiences, that processing power was steadily increasing from when I start using Macs in the mid 90's, until around the 2012-2013 Mac models, and seemed to have leveled off.

i noticed a peak at 2012 where nothing was innovated anymore, computer wise.
maybe the M1 might have some significance but still the same usage.

 

[B S Magnet]

Not sure if this is the right sub-forum for this, but since it's the closest thing MacRumors has to a "general Mac" forum, here goes:

A few week ago, I got curious about the rates of change in computer specs over time. I've felt for ages that the rate of spec increases in desktop/laptop hardware has slowed significantly in the past 10 years (for Macs and PCs alike), but I wondered whether that was actually supported by data. Since there are data sources that have detailed records of the specs for every Mac ever made, I decided to try and wrangle and plot that data in R to see what showed up.

Here's the base RAM for all Mac models over time, from 1984 to present (note that the Y axis is on a log scale):View attachment 1961376
As you can see, there's a steady rate of increase until the early 2010's, where it starts to level off.

For comparison, here's the maximum RAM for those same models, which is a little more linear (especially thanks to the new Mac Pros):
View attachment 1961377
Interestingly, this one seems to jump and plateau every decade or so (128 MB from ~1985 to ~1993, 2 GB from ~1996 to ~2003, etc.)

Finally, here's the base storage capacity over time, with the colours of the points indicating the type of storage (HDD, SDD, or Fusion):
View attachment 1961378
With this one, you can see how drive capacity increases slowed a bit during 2000-2010 and have pretty much plateaued since 2010.

Anyway, the dataset I've got is pretty comprehensive, and has everything from original MRSP data (for most models) to Geekbench scores. Are there any other visualizations of Macs over time people want to see?

Also, to be clear: this isn't an "Apple fell off" post since Macs have more-or-less kept pace with the broader PC industry (especially during the Intel years). I just think it's interesting to look at these trends over time!

In the first two data plots, I see, respectively, the impact which processing power (and that on which it depends) dictates base memory demands (it would be interesting to see this data plot with a related data plot of CPU processing power — power, not clock speeds — laid over this data plot to see how nearing the Moore’s Law ceiling (for silicon semiconductors) relates to base RAM being shipped); and on the max RAM, the gap which is widening between max RAM offered to consumer/prosumer products, versus the outright-professional systems with expansion modularity (in fact, data points for models with non-upgradeable RAM deserve their own hue to distinguish their increased prevalence over time).

In the third data point, I suss a lot of this flattening in the curve comes not so much with the introduction of Fusion and SSD and the initial price premiums of the solid-state-reliant tech, but rather with manufacturers like Apple coaxing users to rely more on subscription-based cloud storage like iCloud, Dropbox, and/or Google Drive, rather than encouraging users to keep more data around locally (i.e., following a disposability model borrowed from glass devices like iPhone and iPad).

Again, data points here on Macs whose SSD capacity cannot be upgraded deserve a different–shaped data plot (like a square, in lieu of a circle) to reflect the was Apple has acclimatized consumers to think of their devices as disposable and inherently non-modular.

 

[HiVolt]

Again, data points here on Macs whose SSD capacity cannot be upgraded deserve a different–shaped data plot (like a square, in lieu of a circle) to reflect the was Apple has acclimatized consumers to think of their devices as disposable and inherently non-modular.

Same for RAM. that has been non upgradeable for close to a decade now in all the notebooks since 2013, SSD's became non upgradeable starting 2015 with the lame duck MacBook, and followed later by the pro's and air's.

 

[B S Magnet]

Same for RAM. that has been non upgradeable for close to a decade now in all the notebooks since 2013, SSD's became non upgradeable starting 2015 with the lame duck MacBook, and followed later by the pro's and air's.

Yah, I suggested something along those lines at the end of the first paragraph.

 

[ahurst]

In the first two data plots, I see, respectively, the impact which processing power (and that on which it depends) dictates base memory demands (it would be interesting to see this data plot with a related data plot of CPU processing power — power, not clock speeds — laid over this data plot to see how nearing the Moore’s Law ceiling (for silicon semiconductors) relates to base RAM being shipped)

Just quickly plotting Geekbench 2 scores against RAM sizes, it looks like a pretty linear relationship:

Of course, that's missing Mac data from the past 2-3 years because Geekbench 2.

In the third data point, I suss a lot of this flattening in the curve comes not so much with the introduction of Fusion and SSD and the initial price premiums of the solid-state-reliant tech, but rather with manufacturers like Apple coaxing users to rely more on subscription-based cloud storage like iCloud, Dropbox, and/or Google Drive, rather than encouraging users to keep more data around locally (i.e., following a disposability model borrowed from glass devices like iPhone and iPad).

This is definitely true, although I think in that time period we also a) started hitting the limits of traditional spinning hard drive tech (see: the tradeoffs of SMR HDDs used today to cram more data capacity), and b) we started hitting diminishing perceptual returns in terms of media file sizes (e.g. music, photos, movies, etc.) so even if you weren't streaming everything or offloading to the cloud, your media itself would be increasing in quality/file size from 2010-2020 the way it would have from 2000-2010.

Again, data points here on Macs whose SSD capacity cannot be upgraded deserve a different–shaped data plot (like a square, in lieu of a circle) to reflect the was Apple has acclimatized consumers to think of their devices as disposable and inherently non-modular.

This info is actually in the database, so I can try to do this! For storage it's a bit tricky though, since there are some models where the SSD is fully non-replaceable (e.g. my 14" M1 MBP) and others where it's *technically* replaceable but it was never meant to be, and you need a special adapter adapter to do it (e.g. my 2013 iMac).

For RAM it's a bit more cut-and-dry, unless of course you want to nitpick about stuff like all the PowerPC Macs with one soldered RAM DIMM and one user-upgradable slot (or the iMac G4s with an easily-replaceable RAM socket and a second one hidden deep in the machine)

 

[ahurst]

Got some more visualizations to share!

Here's the same Geekbench 2-over-time plot I posted earlier, split by laptop, desktop, or workstation (Mac Pro, Xserve, iMac Pro, PowerMac G3/G4/G5):

As you can see, laptops saw the biggest leap in performance from PowerPC (blue) to Intel (green), with workstation performance being much more continuous and desktops being somewhere in between (the little green dot close to all the blue ones there is the Core Solo Mac mini). Also, it looks like workstation performance has increased more steadily in the last decade than laptops and desktops, which have levelled off a bit more.

On a similar note, here's the Geekbench 5 scores (single-core and multi-core) over time for the newer Macs that support it. Note that I omitted workstations from the data for these plots since they're generally outliers and obscured the general trends a bit:

On both plots, you can clearly see a big increase in performance from the late Core 2 Duo era into the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era, followed by a period of general stagnation. On the multi-core side, we see things pick up a bit around 2017 with the 6 and 8-core MBPs, but with only gradual improvements in single core until the M1 and M1 Pro kick things up a notch with major single-core improvements.

On the multi-core side the advent of the M1 is a little less dramatic, but the decrease in spread of the red points shows that multi-core performance across the product range is now consistent with the fastest non-Workstation Intel Macs.

EDIT: Another way to look at the single-core figures is that the M1's single-core performance is about where Intel chips would be at if they'd kept up the "Core 2 to Ivy Bridge" pace of improvement for the past decade.

 

[Analog Kid]

Got some more visualizations to share!

Here's the same Geekbench 2-over-time plot I posted earlier, split by laptop, desktop, or workstation (Mac Pro, Xserve, iMac Pro, PowerMac G3/G4/G5):
View attachment 1961557
As you can see, laptops saw the biggest leap in performance from PowerPC (blue) to Intel (green), with workstation performance being much more continuous and desktops being somewhere in between (the little green dot close to all the blue ones there is the Core Solo Mac mini). Also, it looks like workstation performance has increased more steadily in the last decade than laptops and desktops, which have levelled off a bit more.

On a similar note, here's the Geekbench 5 scores (single-core and multi-core) over time for the newer Macs that support it. Note that I omitted workstations from the data for these plots since they're generally outliers and obscured the general trends a bit:
View attachment 1961564View attachment 1961562
On both plots, you can clearly see a big increase in performance from the late Core 2 Duo era into the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era, followed by a period of general stagnation. On the multi-core side, we see things pick up a bit around 2017 with the 6 and 8-core MBPs, but with only gradual improvements in single core until the M1 and M1 Pro kick things up a notch with major single-core improvements.

On the multi-core side the advent of the M1 is a little less dramatic, but the decrease in spread of the red points shows that multi-core performance across the product range is now consistent with the fastest non-Workstation Intel Macs.

EDIT: Another way to look at the single-core figures is that the M1's single-core performance is about where Intel chips would be at if they'd kept up the "Core 2 to Ivy Bridge" pace of improvement for the past decade.

It looks like you're plotting all processors released in a given year and marking the trend line at the average of those?

That's a little unfair, because I suspect most people are looking to see how performance has improved over the years and are probably looking at the blue trend line to indicate, well, the overall trend. If you start averaging in the lower cost, lower performance chips with the high performance chips, then you're penalizing Intel for releasing low end parts.

I think it would be more sensible for the trendline to track the peak performance each year, or the trimmed mean of the top cluster if Geekbench isn't already doing something like that to reject the overclock scores and such.

 

[profcutter]

Wait, I’m confused. Which mac models have 32 gig minimum ram? On your first graph it suggests there are 3 models with 32 minimum. It’s just iMac Pro and Mac Pro, or are you considering Macbook pro configured with M1 Max a base model?

 

[ahurst]

It looks like you're plotting all processors released in a given year and marking the trend line at the average of those?

That's a little unfair, because I suspect most people are looking to see how performance has improved over the years and are probably looking at the blue trend line to indicate, well, the overall trend. If you start averaging in the lower cost, lower performance chips with the high performance chips, then you're penalizing Intel for releasing low end parts.

I think it would be more sensible for the trendline to track the peak performance each year, or the trimmed mean of the top cluster if Geekbench isn't already doing something like that to reject the overclock scores and such.

No, this is just the CPUs released in every given Mac in the past two decades (for the Geekbench 2 scores) or ~13 years (for the Geekbench 5 scores). The trend line is just meant to represent the computing power of the average Mac model at that point in time (though it can definitely be weighted by different products having more SKUs, e.g. the Mac mini having both normal and server variants with the same specs in the early 2010's), it's not meant to be representative of the CPU market in general.

I can split the Geekbench 5 scores by desktop and laptop to separate some of the lower-end chips from the faster ones, though Apple has certainly used its share of laptop-spec CPUs in base model iMacs and Mac Minis over the years:

Interesting how the extra cores on the higher end MBPs makes for a clear split in the multi-core scores in the late Intel era! Also, again, "Desktop" here is excluding workstations like the Mac Pro since it adds a lot more spread to the data. You can see the last panel of the Geekbench 2 plot in my last post for an idea of what Workstation performance over time looks like (more steady increases, thanks to increasing core counts).

 

[ahurst]

Wait, I’m confused. Which mac models have 32 gig minimum ram? On your first graph it suggests there are 3 models with 32 minimum. It’s just iMac Pro and Mac Pro, or are you considering Macbook pro configured with M1 Max a base model?

Ah, yes. To clarify: the database I'm using isn't just every Mac model, it's every Mac with every processor configuration. As such, M1 Pro and M1 Max MBPs are treated as separate datapoints, and hence the M1 Max SKUs have a base RAM of 32 GB. The other two Mac models with a base memory of 32 GB are the iMac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro.

 

[crazy dave]

Really interesting, thanks @ahurst!

 

[Analog Kid]

No, this is just the CPUs released in every given Mac in the past two decades (for the Geekbench 2 scores) or ~13 years (for the Geekbench 5 scores). The trend line is just meant to represent the computing power of the average Mac model at that point in time (though it can definitely be weighted by different products having more SKUs, e.g. the Mac mini having both normal and server variants with the same specs in the early 2010's), it's not meant to be representative of the CPU market in general.

I can split the Geekbench 5 scores by desktop and laptop to separate some of the lower-end chips from the faster ones, though Apple has certainly used its share of laptop-spec CPUs in base model iMacs and Mac Minis over the years:

View attachment 1961587View attachment 1961589
Interesting how the extra cores on the higher end MBPs makes for a clear split in the multi-core scores in the late Intel era! Also, again, "Desktop" here is excluding workstations like the Mac Pro since it adds a lot more spread to the data. You can see the last panel of the Geekbench 2 plot in my last post for an idea of what Workstation performance over time looks like (more steady increases, thanks to increasing core counts).

Ok, I see what you're going for. It still feels a bit like the trend is more impacted by the product mix than the technology though-- especially if you're including every configuration. If you look at the desktop mulitcore score you posted, it looks like there was no progress between 2012 and 2016, but that's not actually the case-- the top performing machines continued to improve but lower end models (presumably Mini's) were introduced. If you're mapping every configuration then if there were more system configurations for the low end than the high end, it will pull the average down. The data's all there to draw better conclusions, obviously, but people tend to trust the summaries first.

Anyway, your plot, your rules... ?


One chart I'd always thought might be interesting to see is Multicore/Corecount or even a more normalized multicore/corecount/singlecore, as a way to see how multicore efficiency evolves over time. Not sure Geekbench really exercises the part of the system that would bottleneck though-- it's probably running tests that are fairly isolated on each core?

 

[B S Magnet]

Ok, I see what you're going for. It still feels a bit like the trend is more impacted by the product mix than the technology though-- especially if you're including every configuration. If you look at the desktop mulitcore score you posted, it looks like there was no progress between 2012 and 2016, but that's not actually the case-- the top performing machines continued to improve but lower end models (presumably Mini's) were introduced.

I think your observation is correct for the laptops — as introducing the new-gen MacBooks in 2015, all with steeply reduced processor capacities to fit the form factor’s cooling limits, dinged the overall picture for the MBPs and MBAs (which were already on their curve). If one omits the data points for the MacBook, it would probably appear that the multicore curve didn’t actually drop at all.

As for desktops, the observed data plateau from around the same time — late 2012 to 2017 — may be attributed to Apple adding education-only and heavily downclocked budget variants of the iMac configured with reduced processors (some examples: [1] [2] [3] [4]) along with one Mac mini outlier otherwise not found with Apple’s other desktop products — leaving consumer and prosumer models to pick up that dragging element.

Moreover, there was also a nearly two-year span (June 2017 to March 2019) when Apple didn’t update any of the iMac line, whilst the only updates during that stretch occurring with the iMac line being supplemented by the short-lived (and never updated) iMac Pro from late 2017. Similarly, Apple didn’t mess with the Mac minis for four years, between late 2014 and late 2018. Without the iMac Pro numbers, followed by updates to the Mac mini line, the multicore performance plateau would have carried forward a bit longer.

If anything, Mac minis and MacBook Pros, of any particular generation, have tended to share several of the same technical improvements offered during roughly similar time frames, albeit set for their specific form factors and releases at slightly different times within a particular calendar year. So it’s unlikely the drop would come from what the Mac minis offered during those “plateau years”.

If you're mapping every configuration then if there were more system configurations for the low end than the high end, it will pull the average down.

Indeed!

 

[ahurst]

Really interesting, thanks @ahurst!

You're welcome, glad people are finding it interesting! If there are any other cool visualizations you can think of let me know, there's still a lot of stuff to be explored in this data.

Ok, I see what you're going for. It still feels a bit like the trend is more impacted by the product mix than the technology though-- especially if you're including every configuration. If you look at the desktop mulitcore score you posted, it looks like there was no progress between 2012 and 2016, but that's not actually the case-- the top performing machines continued to improve but lower end models (presumably Mini's) were introduced. If you're mapping every configuration then if there were more system configurations for the low end than the high end, it will pull the average down. The data's all there to draw better conclusions, obviously, but people tend to trust the summaries first.

Anyway, your plot, your rules... ?

It's more the database's opinions than my own! How would you prefer the data to be filtered? Just one data point per model/year, representing the fastest configuration available? I *think* that's possible with the data I've got, but it may take a little wrangling to come up with the right filter rule to do so.

One chart I'd always thought might be interesting to see is Multicore/Corecount or even a more normalized multicore/corecount/singlecore, as a way to see how multicore efficiency evolves over time. Not sure Geekbench really exercises the part of the system that would bottleneck though-- it's probably running tests that are fairly isolated on each core?

Ah, so Geekbench multicore score divided by actual core count? There's no clear "core count" field in my database for whatever reason, but I was already thinking of trying to infer it from other fields to look at something similar.

 

[profcutter]

Mind sharing your data tables? I’d like to play with it in a visualizer!