Even in data centres, I'm starting to see performance regressions: I just benchmarked the recently released Azure Ddsv6/Edsv6 series of virtual machines, and in several metrics they're slower than the Dadsv5/Eadsv5 series that are more than three years older!
IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The exponential curves have become logarithmic.
If I'm reading the model correctly, that's comparing Intel machines to AMD machines. I'd imagine it makes sense that there are workloads that AMD does better than Intel (and hopefully vice versa). How do Dadsv6 compare?
Azure doesn't have Dadsv6 in Australia yet. Any year now... any year.
Fundamentally, they're both x86 CPUs, both "high end server chips", both in nearly identical (maxed-out) configurations, etc...
I just got used to computers getting so much faster over a three-year time period that it was almost pointless to benchmark them. The vendor hardly mattered, not within such a narrow market segment.
IT hardware performance has definitely been levelling off. The exponential curves have become logarithmic.