Found this online:
The other reason foundry die shrinks aren’t as interesting as they used to be is for the simple reason that they don’t deliver much in the way of improved performance any more, at least not outside specific market segments. Six years ago, the Core i5-2537M was a Sandy Bridge-era core clocked at 1.4GHz base / 2.3GHz Turbo with a TDP of 17W. Today, Intel’s Core i5-7300U is a 15W chip with a 2.6GHz base clock and a 3.5GHz Turbo. It’s TDP is 15W. Intel, in other words, improved the base clock by 1.86x and the boost clock by 1.52x all while trimming the TDP.
But in the desktop space, performance gains have been rarer, overclocking headroom has shrunk, and frequency gains have been doled out very sparingly. Intel has absolutely made progress over this time, but not at anything like a quick pace. Again, that’s not the company’s fault — it’s related, as we’ve said before, more to the difficulties with scaling silicon than anything — but with AMD surging back into the CPU fight, Intel may find itself under increased pressure to demonstrate that its 10nm hardware can do more than look impressively futuristic in a variety of graphs.
