I don’t believe these numbers mean what they think. Their sample size has dropped dramatically since the previous year, from 100k to 25k for laptops and from 186k to 48k for desktops. Given that all the data comes from people choosing to run the benchmark, I wonder what population has suddenly left the data, and if that is significant.
Also consider that the CPU is only one component of this benchmark. The article itself says that Windows 11 performance is worse than Windows 10. This might be another instance of “What Andy [Grove] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away.”
Yeah, good point. Or maybe it means people got slightly less-performant systems for Christmas than last year. Gates’ Law finally catching up with us all.
I think there are several factors at play here, starting with “my current machine is good enough” and lower PC hardware sales as well as indeed, a bit of a shift to lower-power, quieter, smaller machines, and CPU characteristics changing (with more e-cores).
Example: The mini-PC market has exploded, and people buying those are neither benchmark enthusiasts nor an active part of their readership.
Could be several things, ranging from mundane to very concerning.
- People are downgrading their computers.
- Windows 11 is more bloated and slower, decreasing the test scores.
- All the security mitigations are making everything slower but they've been masked by hardware improvements in the past. Now there isn't much in terms of that so we start the slow descent to death.
It could also mean that consumers are buying more budget models and less pro- ones. Given cost of living crisis (at least in Europe) it would not be surprising.
It doesn’t even have to be a budgetary concern, it could mean that more people are choosing power efficiency over computing performance. Thin and light laptops are good enough for a lot these days, and they are still pricey.
- People buying new high end computers are no longer benchmarking them (at least with PassMark) while people buying lower end or second hand computers still do so
I know I haven’t bothered on my last two computers, partly because CPU performance is so far past what I need for most workloads, and partly because for the rest, I care about actual workload rather than synthetic benchmarks.
I got a Surface laptop with the Snapdragon. 32GB, fastest model.
In general use it feels way faster than my 1 year old Lenovo, which was 2x the price.
It's the the Lenovo one is specifically programmed to only clock up when the load is sustained for longer, whereas the Surface one clocks up much faster.
And still, it lasts 10 hours, and my Lenovo does 1.5 at max.
I feel like something's got to be weird with your Lenovo... I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 that's a little over 5 years old, use it on battery every day, never replaced the battery, and it still lasts around 3-4 hours.
How much did you pay for the Surface? I just got a Lenovo P14s w/ 64GB and Ryzen 8840HS for around $1100. I haven't used the Surface Pro Snapdragon yet but this laptop screams. I think it mostly comes down to disk performance for me though.
I wonder how widespread the adoption of steam deck + clones has been amongst benchmark participants (very very good perf per watt, relatively middling absolute performance), that could explain a lot. Not sure where they would end up on the desktop vs laptop categorization.
For a little while before that, CPU performance was stagnant with Intel on top until AMD released Ryzen and Zen, and Intel got stuck on 14nm for half a decade. Suddenly AMD is posting substantial performance improvements every cycle and Intel is cranking up TDP to compete. Now we have competitive x86 processors from two different sources AND competitive ARM processors from two others.
What also happened in the same time frame according to this website:
- [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution
- [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down
- [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell
So it comes down to: More old (ancient?) machines in the Dataset. Why?
Unknown, but probably not indicating a trend regarding the hardware people use in the real World (TM) has changed.
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Also consider that the CPU is only one component of this benchmark. The article itself says that Windows 11 performance is worse than Windows 10. This might be another instance of “What Andy [Grove] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away.”
I suspect that's just an effect of 2025 data being limited to just ~January, rather than a full 12 months.
If people run a benchmark only once every 4 months on average, that would certainly explain the sample size.
Example: The mini-PC market has exploded, and people buying those are neither benchmark enthusiasts nor an active part of their readership.
Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- People are downgrading their computers.
- Windows 11 is more bloated and slower, decreasing the test scores.
- All the security mitigations are making everything slower but they've been masked by hardware improvements in the past. Now there isn't much in terms of that so we start the slow descent to death.
I know I haven’t bothered on my last two computers, partly because CPU performance is so far past what I need for most workloads, and partly because for the rest, I care about actual workload rather than synthetic benchmarks.
In general use it feels way faster than my 1 year old Lenovo, which was 2x the price.
It's the the Lenovo one is specifically programmed to only clock up when the load is sustained for longer, whereas the Surface one clocks up much faster.
And still, it lasts 10 hours, and my Lenovo does 1.5 at max.
It is slower for scientific/technical computing or anything else that contains great amounts of operations with either arrays or big numbers.
Even for the things where the Qualcomm CPUs may be faster, their performance per dollar is inferior to the Intel/AMD CPUs.
- 3D VCache: Are the X3D processors over represented on this benchmark?
- Focus on Battery Life: the latest mobile processors nearly double battery life with minimal increase in multicore performance.
Overall, CPUs are specializing a bit more than the past and that may be impacting the scores.
[1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html
[2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html
[3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html
[from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]