News PassMark sees the first yearly drop in average CPU performance in its 20 years of benchmark results

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Doesn't this simply imply that more users are using lower-processing-power devices? We are talking about an average.... So chips aren't getting slower, people are just avoiding the (perhaps unnecessary cost) of higher-end devices. No suprise here, perhaps we've reached a point where "good enough" is no longer anywhere near the cutting edge of processor speed, and folks are being more budget saavy with their computer purchases.
 
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PassMark should be able to present this data in a way that makes it clear what happened.
They should be able to break it down by OS or by CPU with enough granularity to at least show what is dragging down the average.
What's happened in the last year? ARM windows laptops sorta became a thing, but seem unpopular. Windows 11 continues to be unpopular. Prices went up a lot, and salaries did not go up at all - so people are probably getting lower end parts within their price band... but I don't know that average CPU perf/$ has actually gone down significantly - I would guess it's stayed near stagnant. Even then, a lot of people would need to be buying new computers that are worse performing at this benchmark than their old computers, and I'm not sure why they would bother buying anything at that point.

Did PassMark open up compatibility with Chromebooks or something for the first time, or did it suddenly become more popular to run this benchmark on lower end hardware? Or maybe even a mass Windows update is bogging down everybody's computers - possibly copilot. More information is needed.
 
Not saying that chips haven't taken a turn towards efficiency and a new path as well as massively slowing down in speed increases but....PassMark has always been something I took with a grain of salt. Is it just as possible that they haven't' kept up with new architectures and their numbers are wrong?

I feel like it is a bit of both when we look at real world data. Intel is slipping but they are not the only game in town.
 
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Giroro said:
What's happened in the last year? ARM windows laptops sorta became a thing, but seem unpopular. Windows 11 continues to be unpopular. Prices went up a lot, and salaries did not go up at all - so people are probably getting lower end parts within their price band...
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1. Steamdeck + all the copycat windows handhelds
2. winlator and powerful enough arm devices that can now run x86 code.

Everybody that got a device like that has probably ran a bunch of benchmarks on it to see how it compares to a standard x86 desktop system.
People that buy "conventional" systems look up benches on the net and most only run a benchmark if something seems off with the performance.
 
Lavadog321 said:
Doesn't this simply imply that more users are using lower-processing-power devices? We are talking about an average.... So chips aren't getting slower, people are just avoiding the (perhaps unnecessary cost) of higher-end devices. No suprise here, perhaps we've reached a point where "good enough" is no longer anywhere near the cutting edge of processor speed, and folks are being more budget saavy with their computer purchases.
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Good enough for me was a newly bought, in early 2024, Cezanne R5 5500. Then in christmas of same year a R7 5800x. My budget for an upgrade told me i have this much to spend on a CPU. So i got an old chip for pre-xmas dumping stock on an old socket price. 130 pounds for a 4 year old chip. That was also the same price i paid for the R5 5500 at the beginning of the same year.

In terms of a CPU upgrade, from a R5 5500 to a R7 5800x, that was massive. I can possibly skip over AM5 now since i slapped the R5 5500 into the last AM4 system i kept around to use as a linux training machine. So even if main dies i still have enough CPU power to play modern games with and do the things that a rasberry pi 4 cannot.

I cant always afford the latest and the greatest. The last time i did that i bought into the AM4 socket when it released and got the R5 1500x. BUt even then i waited a bit for prices to come down from the insane to the high but lets get it now and not wait till the sock is 3 or 4 years old prices.

Funny thing is that the Am4 has lasted a long time and is actually still going. Tons here reported that it was the AM4 platform that sold best last year, 2024, and not the AM5.

So budgets do dictate what people buy no matter what AMD/Intel/Nvidia release.

I am really happy with my R 7 5800x. I can do one better even with the 5800X3D if i sink even more money into the socket. But that is as high as the socket gets so i really am sitting on the nearly best of the best of that socket and it only cost me 130 pounds. Others paid 500-700 i think when this chip came out.
 
helper800 said:
The tariffs will certainly start to cause more inflation again and reduce our buying power in the coming months / years.
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There's another "fact" spew that ignores the broader picture; the goal is to have federal income taxes eliminated. Will that reduce buying power? If you're going to bring in economics, bring in all of economics, not one acute angle, lol. The difference is that Congress has to approve changes to federal income, so there's a lot more inertia to make changes on such.

I was (am) a homeowner, vehicle owner and operator, first-time father, and had the same job prior to 2019 (which does include some raises since then). My household's quality of living has definitely gone down since then, and I'm specifically referring to disposable income and what my dollar actually gets me. Buying power seems to ignore shrinkflation, i.e. raw inflation numbers don't even paint an accurate portrayal on the value of what's being purchased. Mortgage and automotive interest rates have been killer for years now, and indeed the automotive industry is cracking as more people are defaulting on loans or can't afford them in the first place. And to be fair, not every State has had energy prices and other State-specific problems continue to worsen like me... guess I'm saying everyone's mileage will vary on this -- a simple statistic is just too, well simplistic on this topic, lol.

Anyways, sorry, digressing! My hypothesis is that there's just more "average" users that are running PassMark compared to prosumers and enthusiasts; if the demographic shifts, that would influence the scores, right?
 
JTWrenn said:
....PassMark has always been something I took with a grain of salt. Is it just as possible that they haven't' kept up with new architectures and their numbers are wrong?
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I was thinking the same, especially when seeing that plateau; that would make it seem like they aren't keeping up on utilizing all cores, as well as features. For example, if AMD's X3D's CPUs are starting to get into several market share % points but the 3D V-Cache isn't being utilized any more than typical L3, this could show a backwards-trend as prior to the 9000 series, they couldn't overclock and were frequency and power limited compared to their non-X3D counterparts.
 
DS426 said:
There's another "fact" spew that ignores the broader picture; the goal is to have federal income taxes eliminated. Will that reduce buying power? If you're going to bring in economics, bring in all of economics, not one acute angle, lol. The difference is that Congress has to approve changes to federal income, so there's a lot more inertia to make changes on such.
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Who's goal is it to eliminate federal income taxes via tariffs? My "spew" of facts directly contradicts what I was replying to as a matter of fact. They said, "Prices went up a lot, and salaries did not go up at all," which is factually incorrect. If they meant that their specific salaries did not go up, that's a different matter because they were saying everyone in general did not receive salary increases. If you want an argument on the merits of certain fiscal policies, this is not the place to have it.
DS426 said:
I was (am) a homeowner, vehicle owner and operator, first-time father, and had the same job prior to 2019 (which does include some raises since then). My household's quality of living has definitely gone down since then, and I'm specifically referring to disposable income and what my dollar actually gets me. Buying power seems to ignore shrinkflation, i.e. raw inflation numbers don't even paint an accurate portrayal on the value of what's being purchased. Mortgage and automotive interest rates have been killer for years now, and indeed the automotive industry is cracking as more people are defaulting on loans or can't afford them in the first place. And to be fair, not every State has had energy prices and other State-specific problems continue to worsen like me... guess I'm saying everyone's mileage will vary on this -- a simple statistic is just too, well simplistic on this topic, lol.
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The "statistic" I quoted and sourced is not a singular fact, but a conclusion based upon a collection of facts. I am not going to argue your specific personal economic position in the economy of the last 5 years. An increase in buying power for the median worker does not equate to all workers having increased buying power, just more people than not.
 
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randomizer said:
This graph is based on global data.
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Read it again, it's based on the US and its people;

"We find that in the year ending in the second quarter of 2024, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, plus an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year. "

Or are you referring to something other than my post you quoted?
 
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Probably several factors at once. Bigger share of people buying "lower" tier new CPUs. More older systems being forced over to W11 (which would also be the 2nd biggest reason for people to run a fresh PassMark test). Possibly something wrong with the PassMark test, ie not taking full advantage of new CPUs for whatever reason.

Not to surprised by the laptop numbers as energy efficiency is the #1 goal on laptops, not raw power. Kinda surprised that hadn't happened already to laptops.
 
But if you look at the single thread performance (the (Thread) line), which this article did not, it only increases, so that says to me that since AMD and Intel are focusing more on efficiency cores instead of performance cores, and with SMT being de-emphasized or not present, scores in Passmark are going to level out in terms of per-chip performance, yet not reflect real world results.
 
This data is incomplete you can not get an average score from less users. You need the user count to be equal or near equal to accurately say the average score is higher or lower, so this information is incomplete.
 
Nothing is wrong with people getting comfortable with the average amount of CPU processing power available.
Working at a library for 10 years, when I first started we used to buy Dell Optiplex 7010s with 4 core 4 thread i5's and 8 gigabytes of ram for the patron and staff computers .
Now the Optiplex 7020s (newer model) come with i5-14600's with 20 threads and 16 gigabytes of ram.
Doubling the ram and more the 5x the computing power for roughly the same price.

My boss was tempted to go down to the i3 models but I was able to keep us on i5 due to the price still being within reason!

Patron and staff computing needs haven't increased 5x, even with Blender now being available in our images!
 
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helper800 said:
This is incorrect. Buying power for the median worker has increased since 2019 to 2024. This is a common misconception since inflation started increasing. We collectively have even more money compared to the cost of goods after all the inflation for a while now. The tariffs will certainly start to cause more inflation again and reduce our buying power in the coming months / years.
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Speak for yourself, I know many companies that have basically stopped giving people wage increases for many years or are pitifully low 1% rises. My wife is a senior QC manager and has to fight tooth and nail for any sort of pay rise and most of the lesser employees get zilch. This has been the case across 5 companies she has worked for. Our real-world income has declined since 2019 with only $5K in pay rises in 6 years.
 
Aples vs Oranges.

Passmark stats are the stats of people that downloaded, run it and decided to share it. Not representative of what computers are in the market or what people are buying.

Also, with the raise in importance of the GPU, it makes sense to have a more tame CPU and beef up the GPU.

I'm still puzzled as thou why anyone will want a computer that consumes more energy than a home heater, but that is a different story.
 
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helper800 said:
Who's goal is it to eliminate federal income taxes via tariffs? My "spew" of facts directly contradicts what I was replying to as a matter of fact. They said, "Prices went up a lot, and salaries did not go up at all," which is factually incorrect. If they meant that their specific salaries did not go up, that's a different matter because they were saying everyone in general did not receive salary increases. If you want an argument on the merits of certain fiscal policies, this is not the place to have it.

The "statistic" I quoted and sourced is not a singular fact, but a conclusion based upon a collection of facts. I am not going to argue your specific personal economic position in the economy of the last 5 years. An increase in buying power for the median worker does not equate to all workers having increased buying power, just more people than not.
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In UK, inflation is measured by unit of weight between the measures, regardless of size of the packages. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened in US as this things tend to be common sense when doing this kind of statistical analysis. So you will feel in your basket the shrinkflation, but that will not be reflected on the actual inflation prices.
More pernicious is the stock management, where some cheap products (in rotation) are always missing, forcing you to either go to another shop or buy a more expensive brand.
 
Before digging into the data, my first thoughts are about how Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake have been affecting the market. Meteor Lake improved on power-efficiency, but failed to outperform its predecessor (not unlike what happened with Ice Lake). And Arrow Lake dropped hyperthreading, while not adding any more cores. Both should be reflected in their multicore scores (although Arrow Lake manages decent multi-core rendering scores, due to the massively improved FP throughput of its E-cores).

Another factor that might be weighing in on desktops is how the #800X3D models could be diverting gamers off the track of buying CPUs with the most cores & therefore highest multi-core performance.

Kindaian said:
Passmark stats are the stats of people that downloaded, run it and decided to share it. Not representative of what computers are in the market or what people are buying.
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Right, so gamers should be disproportionately represented among these submissions. That further underscores my point about the #800X3D models and their impact.
 
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