How to compare CPU performance of different eras (I mean: with old sockets, old ram...)

[Alexalexalexalex]

I want to understand how much do the present cpus perform, comparing them with the 2000's, the 2005's, the 2010's cpus.
If I search old review, then I find related benchmarks... but, you know, each review has tests between cpus of the same year or using games or software of that year.

So what is the easy way to understand if a cpu is 5x or 10x or 20x faster than an old cpu (for example)?
Can I use the Passmark value for this thing? Is it a correct thing? (I don't need high precision, I just want to have an idea)

Thanks in Advance.
Alex.

 

[GhislainG]

Passmark is good, but it has been updated over the years to take advantage of new technologies. There's no easy way to tell how much faster an i7-5960X is over a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz.

 

[jsmithepa]

The computing community measure basic performance in term of Operations per Second, so computers is been measured in MegaFlops, Teraflops and now Petaflops. I do not know if they kept track of them all these years, google away, *somebody* an historian am sure have this data somewhere.