How stagnant is CPU technology?

14 January 2026 · 2 min

Sometimes, people tell me that there is no more progress in CPU performance.

Consider these three processors which had comparable prices at release time.

1. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (Zen 5, with up to 5.3 GHz boost) was released in 2024.
2. The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (Zen 4, with up to 5.1 GHz boost) was released in 2023.
3. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (Zen 3, with 3.4 GHz base) was released in 2022.

Let us consider their results on on the PartialTweets open benchmark (JSON parsing). It is a single core benchmark.

In two years, on this benchmark, AMD more than doubled the performance for the same cost.

So what is happening is that processor performance is indeed going up, sometimes dramatically so, but not all of our software can benefit from the improvements. Software developers must track the trends and adapt our software accordingly. Unfortunately, it is hard work and it requires expertise. In the case of this benchmark, the simdjson library is designed to benefit from better processor features.

Not all software can easily run much faster on new processors, and genuine progress is difficult.

Let us be ambitious. Let us move forward!