> but the timing for an individual single-threaded computation hasn't really improved in the last 15 years
The clock speeds haven't really gone up anymore, but computations still got considerably faster. From an i7 2700k (2011) to an i7 13700k single core benchmark scores went up 131%
First, that's the kind of change we used to get in 2 years. Having it happen over a decade is barely noticeable compared to where we used to be.
Second, over that time period we've had a lot of changes in tooling. Some make code faster. Most make code slower. (Examples include the spread of containerization, and adoption of slow languages like Python.) The result is that programs to do equivalent things might wind up actually faster or slower, no matter what a CPU benchmark shows.
The clock speeds haven't really gone up anymore, but computations still got considerably faster. From an i7 2700k (2011) to an i7 13700k single core benchmark scores went up 131%
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2700K-vs...