Computing power and processors in reality

Today I was wondering how fast my old MacPro (my main production machine) really is compared to the MacMini that I recently bought. And here are the results:

MacPro 3,1 2.8GHz XEON 8-Core vs MacMini 6,2 2.3Ghz i7 4-Core

Now I’m not the biggest hardware geek but I do understand that architectures vary quite a bit and have a substantial influence over computing performance. But a 6 year old machine beating a 2 year old machine by such a big margin may be part of the reason why hardware development feels stalled: We have reached machines that are incredibly powerful.

Granted: for real-time things such as music production we would still like to squeeze every CPU cycle that we can, but hey: at least in my case I still get by with that machine and it doesn’t slow me down too much.