AMD shows where extra CPU performance came from the past decade

Here's an interesting slide from AMD's SemiCon West presentation, it shows where the performance gains of the past decade originated from. The slide reveals that process technology was the single biggest source of higher performance, with a total of 40 percent of the pie, while gains in CPU architecture efficiency accounted for just 17 percent.

Another 15 percent was scored via enhancements in power management and improvements in compilers resulted in 8 percent of the gains.

Additional die size accounted for 12 percent of the performance gains of AMD's CPUs over the past decade, and sadly an increase in TDP also accounted for 8 percent.



In a different slide, the company says that since 2008 (45nm), process technology resulted in a 2x increase in density every 3 years and 2x the energy efficiency every 3.6 years.