Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

barefeats.com
Apple event should be around the 27th of this month, cool those jets.

There was a hefty boost in multicore performance when the 8th generation Intel processors came out. A lot of equivalent models had the number of cores bumped up but sometimes a bit of a drop in the single core performance.

Compare something like i7-7500U and i7-8550u. Pretty equivalent in terms of place in the lineup when they were released but the 8th gen has double the cores.

Never really looked at this before but quite interesting. Why for example under 'multi core' would recent MacBook pros absolutely destroy everything except iMac pro/Mac Pro? Whereas single core it's much of a muchness.

Similar to what Aggi said.
Long story short, recent cpu development has been all about power efficiency and increasing the number of cores.

For ages then processors just got faster by running higher clock rates. Hence you got Pentiums 4's from 10-15 years ago being overclocked to ~8GHz.
But temps were always too high so everything moved to multi core because it's far easier to run 2 cores at 3GHz than one at 4.5GHz (for example). The architecture and instruction sets got more sophisticated too so it's not just speed and number of cores.

So you'll see single core performance hasn't continued the upward trend anywhere near as much as it did, but multi core has continued to improve.

The only problem then is developing programs to utilise multiple cores efficiently.
(Assuming no other bottlenecks) 5GHz is always twice as fast as 2.5GHz, but 2 x 2.5GHz is almost never twice as fast as 1 x 2.5GHz