The first yearly drop in average CPU performance in its 20 years of benchmarks
67 comments
·February 11, 2025sonofhans
crazygringo
> Their sample size has dropped dramatically since the previous year, from 100k to 25k for laptops and from 186k to 48k for desktops.
I suspect that's just an effect of 2025 data being limited to just ~January, rather than a full 12 months.
If people run a benchmark only once every 4 months on average, that would certainly explain the sample size.
rcarmo
I think there are several factors at play here, starting with “my current machine is good enough” and lower PC hardware sales as well as indeed, a bit of a shift to lower-power, quieter, smaller machines, and CPU characteristics changing (with more e-cores).
Example: The mini-PC market has exploded, and people buying those are neither benchmark enthusiasts nor an active part of their readership.
veqq
> “What Andy [Grove] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away.”
Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
high_na_euv
Still, those sample sizes are huge
brokensegue
Sample size won't save you if you're sampling from a different population.
high_na_euv
Sure, but we dont know
null
kazinator
Sample size cannot compensate for sampling bias.
Pannoniae
Could be several things, ranging from mundane to very concerning.
- People are downgrading their computers.
- Windows 11 is more bloated and slower, decreasing the test scores.
- All the security mitigations are making everything slower but they've been masked by hardware improvements in the past. Now there isn't much in terms of that so we start the slow descent to death.
citrin_ru
It could also mean that consumers are buying more budget models and less pro- ones. Given cost of living crisis (at least in Europe) it would not be surprising.
notatoad
It doesn’t even have to be a budgetary concern, it could mean that more people are choosing power efficiency over computing performance. Thin and light laptops are good enough for a lot these days, and they are still pricey.
hibikir
It comes down to what the extra flops get you nowadays. Just like a videogame from 5 years ago doesn't look very dated anymore, we need massive processing power gains to notice anything, and even then, for very few uses.
sidewndr46
What cost of living crisis is going on in Europe?
jdietrich
The combined effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have led to a more severe inflationary shock than the US, but with much worse economic growth and lower wage increases. The majority of households have cut their spending in recent years.
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Eurotrack_Co...
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Eduard
why would consumers downgrade their systems?
Uvix
Hardware failure. Desire for less power to extend battery life.
firstlunchables
Don’t need top of the line. Just need to get things done. Save money, buy lower performance processor. Done and done.
taneq
- People buying new high end computers are no longer benchmarking them (at least with PassMark) while people buying lower end or second hand computers still do so
I know I haven’t bothered on my last two computers, partly because CPU performance is so far past what I need for most workloads, and partly because for the rest, I care about actual workload rather than synthetic benchmarks.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
That's because many new Windows PCs have Snapdragon ARM processors which are slower than x86 processors (but have much better battery life).
OptionOfT
I got a Surface laptop with the Snapdragon. 32GB, fastest model.
In general use it feels way faster than my 1 year old Lenovo, which was 2x the price.
It's the the Lenovo one is specifically programmed to only clock up when the load is sustained for longer, whereas the Surface one clocks up much faster.
And still, it lasts 10 hours, and my Lenovo does 1.5 at max.
Izkata
I feel like something's got to be weird with your Lenovo... I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 that's a little over 5 years old, use it on battery every day, never replaced the battery, and it still lasts around 3-4 hours.
rbower
I don't think so. I have a P16 Gen2 and this thing sucks power like nobody's business. 13950hk and 128gb of RAM. I barely get 1 hour of light programming work. I mostly use it as a desktop though, and I have a separate M2 Mac for traveling.
aftbit
How much did you pay for the Surface? I just got a Lenovo P14s w/ 64GB and Ryzen 8840HS for around $1100. I haven't used the Surface Pro Snapdragon yet but this laptop screams. I think it mostly comes down to disk performance for me though.
aurareturn
Except that the Snapdragon X Elite is actually faster than both AMD and Intel chips on average.
adrian_b
It is faster only for the things that casual users do, which are not computation-intensive.
It is slower for scientific/technical computing or anything else that contains great amounts of operations with either arrays or big numbers.
Even for the things where the Qualcomm CPUs may be faster, their performance per dollar is inferior to the Intel/AMD CPUs.
etempleton
I wonder if there are a couple of trends that skew this data:
- 3D VCache: Are the X3D processors over represented on this benchmark?
- Focus on Battery Life: the latest mobile processors nearly double battery life with minimal increase in multicore performance.
Overall, CPUs are specializing a bit more than the past and that may be impacting the scores.
bhouston
They must be excluding Apple Mx series as that has had a very clear year-over-year increase recently.
mtreis86
Performance per watt continues to increase tho
p1necone
I wonder how widespread the adoption of steam deck + clones has been amongst benchmark participants (very very good perf per watt, relatively middling absolute performance), that could explain a lot. Not sure where they would end up on the desktop vs laptop categorization.
Synaesthesia
For some time there was stagnation on the performance per watt metric. But ever since Apple dropped the M1 there has been a huge change.
aftbit
For a little while before that, CPU performance was stagnant with Intel on top until AMD released Ryzen and Zen, and Intel got stuck on 14nm for half a decade. Suddenly AMD is posting substantial performance improvements every cycle and Intel is cranking up TDP to compete. Now we have competitive x86 processors from two different sources AND competitive ARM processors from two others.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Apple has unlimited money cheat codes. Buy newest/best node, move memory on package, ignore compatibility/longevity.
bee_rider
The companies that don’t buy out the first year-or-whatever of capacity on new nodes should still get the same year-over-year advancement, though. Just, with a small but constant delay.
lotsofpulp
Microsoft had/has the same, yet no results.
lerp-io
it’s cuz developing countries are using more computers
Sweepi
What also happened in the same time frame according to this website:
- [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution
- [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down
- [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell
[1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html
[2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html
[3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html
[from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]
johnklos
So other than Windows constantly and actively slowing down machines, we have dust collecting which then causes CPUs to throttle sooner... I'd be interested to see what the trend in average scores looks like for machines that don't otherwise change over time, although I can't imagine anyone would run Passmark every day or every week for a few years.
nicce
Not only Windows but all the software that counters hardware-level vulnerabilities. I bet those tests don’t disable them.
Havoc
That has got to be a data issue?
I can’t see many let alone a majority downgrading
aaron695
[dead]
fulafel
Does this reflect multicore benchmark results or single thread? For pondering the relevance to real world app performance this seems a central thing as the vast majority of non-game apps can't make effective use of more than one or a few cores.
bentt
Is anyone sad that power efficiency is now important? Apple M chips have wiped the floor with everyone else and it's about time we got good performance without heating the room up.
I don’t believe these numbers mean what they think. Their sample size has dropped dramatically since the previous year, from 100k to 25k for laptops and from 186k to 48k for desktops. Given that all the data comes from people choosing to run the benchmark, I wonder what population has suddenly left the data, and if that is significant.
Also consider that the CPU is only one component of this benchmark. The article itself says that Windows 11 performance is worse than Windows 10. This might be another instance of “What Andy [Grove] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away.”