If you are performing tasks that can be accelerated by the new instructions inside modern CPUs (e.g., quicksync, crypto, etc.) you may find even a modern laptop CPU a lot faster, for example.
This is the thing , indeed . And you're closer to the mark than the average bear is . Simply speaking :
Some 15 years ago a tragedy struck the computer industry . We are still dealing with it since the underlying issue hasn't gone away . Historically , the way to increase processor performance was to find a method of increasing the juice flowing through the circuits . The more juice , the faster instruction cycles were completed . ( This is the MHz , GHz , etc . frequency ratings of silicon ) . Every year there was improvement . Also , occurring at the same time , there were better materials being used and improved circuit designs . But it really just boiled down to "how much juice can we force through the circuit to do things quicker ." And that process continued to work just fine for three decades , from the humble 4 bit 740 kHZ Intel 4004 ( 1971 ) until the Pentium 3s ( 1999-2007 ) . And then one fine day all those highly paid engineers discovered that their magic ... simply ... evaporated ... away . The product was the Pentium 4 and Intel was happy to predict with fanfare the sky's the limit with higher frequencies . Why not ? It worked for the last 35 years , after all . But the Pentium 4s never got as high as the 10 GHz ( ! ) Intel expected , the top chip never going beyond 3.8 GHz . What happened ? Electrically speaking , pushing on a string . A very messy string that started to hurt its environment . The more juice that was pumped into the circuits to obtain new , higher levels of frequency , the more juice that spilled outside doing nothing good . The technical term for this event is power leakage . This leakage started to make the chip pointlessly hot . Heat is the great enemy of electronics . It can reduce performance and definitely will reduce durability . So all this additional juice not only did not do any good , it was actually harmful . Intel went into a panic . The gravy train screeched to a halt .
How did Intel respond ? By continuing to shrink dies . And placing more than one die on a substrate . By reducing the upper frequency expectations . By building processors of processors , you might say , for this is a
physical solution to the leakage problem
. The term that was coined was
core . And also by integrating clever optimization features called processor extensions and similar technologies into the silicon that software coders could take advantage of , instead of simply allowing a process to complete using brute force ( higher frequencies ) . It was the beginning of the multicore processor era ( circa 2005 ) .
If the power leakage hadn't happened and they could have built safely within the laws of physics , we'd have single core ( they wouldn't even need to use the term ) 75 GHz Pentium 14 chips today with maybe little else but MMX15 technology extensions and a piddling amount of energy savings features . Oh , and really cool 3M Fluorinert FC-500 liquid cooling systems and Super Graphite TIM technology . But it did and we don't .
Instead , in reality , we have relatively slowly clocked 56 core Xeons with a list of integrated processor extensions ( like AVX512 ) the length of your arm and some pretty impressive interconnects .
As
throAU pointed out above , modern processor features and extensions really can assist with the running of select programs optimized for them . And these features are one of the results of the power leakage crisis that started 15 years ago . To place it into perspective , lets look at two chips . One before the power leakage crisis and one made well after it began .
1 ) Intel Pentium III 1.2 GHz ( introduced 2001 )
Processor features :
MMX instructions
SSE / Streaming SIMD Extensions
Low power features
--------------------------------------------------------
2 ) Xeon W-3275M ( introduced 2019 )
Processor features :
MMX MMX Extension
EMMX Extended MMX Extension
SSE Streaming SIMD Extensions
SSE2 Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
SSE3 Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
SSSE3 Supplemental SSE3
SSE4.1 Streaming SIMD Extensions 4.1
SSE4.2 Streaming SIMD Extensions 4.2
AVX Advanced Vector Extensions
AVX2 Advanced Vector Extensions 2
AVX-512 Advanced Vector 512-bit (2 Units)
AVX512F AVX-512 Foundation
AVX512CD AVX-512 Conflict Detection
AVX512BW AVX-512 Byte and Word
AVX512DQ AVX-512 Double and Quad
AVX512VL AVX-512 Vector Length
AVX512VNNI AVX-512 Vector Neural Network Instructions
ABM Advanced Bit Manipulation
BMI1 Bit Manipulation Instruction Set 1
BMI2 Bit Manipulation Instruction Set 2
FMA3 3-Operand Fused-Multiply-Add
AES AES Encryption Instructions
RdRand Hardware RNG
ADX Multi-Precision Add-Carry
CLMUL Carry-less Multiplication Extension
F16C 16-bit Floating Point Conversion
x86-16 16-bit x86
x86-32 32-bit x86
x86-64 64-bit x86
Real Real Mode
Protected Protected Mode
SMM System Management Mode
FPU Integrated x87 FPU
NX No-eXecute
HT Hyper-Threading
TBT 2.0 Turbo Boost Technology 2.0
TBMT 3.0 Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0
EIST Enhanced SpeedStep Technology
SST Speed Shift Technology
TXT Trusted Execution Technology (SMX)
vPro Intel vPro
VT-x VT-x (Virtualization)
VT-d VT-d (I/O MMU virtualization)
EPT Extended Page Tables (SLAT)
TSX Transactional Synchronization Extensions
MPX Memory Protection Extensions
Secure Key Secure Key Technology
SMEP OS Guard Technology
VMD Volume Management Device
DL Boost Deep Learning Boost
IPT Identity Protection Technology
See what Intel did ? If they couldn't make the silicon faster , they made it more complex and multicored .
