I recently compared performance per dollar for CPUs and GPUs on benchmarks for GPUs today vs 10 years ago, and suprisingly, CPUs had much bigger gains. Until I saw that for myself, I thought exactly the same thing as you.

It seems shocking given that all the hype is around GPUs.

This probably wouldn't be true for AI specific workloads because one of the other things that happened there in the last 10 years was optimising specifically for math with lower size floats.

That makes sense. Nvidia owns the market and is capturing all the surplus value. They’re competing with themselves to convince you to buy a new card.

It's coz of use cases. Consumer-wise, if you're gamer, CPU just needs to be at "not the bottleneck" level for majority of games as GPU does most of the work when you start increasing resolution and details.

And many pro-level tools (especially in media space) offload to GPU just because of so much higher raw compute power.

So, basically, for many users the gain in performance won't be as visible in their use cases