Year after year, CPUs get faster. Even a midrange chip from today's PCs can run circles around the fastest processors from a decade ago. But last year? That's debatable. According to the makers of benchmarking software PassMark, aggregated CPU performance in 2025 is trending down for the first time in the 20 years PassMark has existed.
The company shared a graph of PassMark data on X (formerly Twitter), which shows both desktop and laptop performance ticking upward each year, save for 2020, when laptop performance was flat. Desktop benchmarks have been growing at a very healthy pace over the last several years, but that growth stalled in 2025. Desktop systems were slightly down, with laptops falling more substantially.
Passmark can't point to any one cause, even with all the data it has on system performance. It's probably a combination of factors, ranging from consumer behavior to the way silicon and software are changing.
At some level, this is probably a choice consumers are making. Everything, computers included, has gotten more expensive over the last several years. This could lead some consumers to buy less powerful systems when the time comes to upgrade. Since PassMark is pointing to aggregated data, these trends could drag the average performance metric down.
However, it's not all behavior. As PassMark points out on X, the two-year-old AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX remains the top-performing CPU in early 2025. Nothing AMD or Intel has released in the interim can match that chip. And when it comes to Intel, many benchmarks report lower numbers for its most recent chips. Intel has moved away from Hyper-Threading in both desktop and laptop parts, preferring instead to focus on making cores more powerful. This causes more heavily multithreaded benchmarks, like math and encoding-based tests, to return lower numbers than last year's CPUs. The new Intel Arrow Lake chips (above) have also been disappointing so far .
Then there's Windows 11, which has a documented history of depressing system performance. Microsoft had to deploy a fix for AMD's latest Zen 5 CPUs in the 24H2 update to deliver the performance AMD promised. And Windows users are increasingly migrating to Windows 11. Microsoft has set this coming October as the end of support for Windows 10 , which has likely accelerated the slow pace of Windows upgrades.
We're still early in the year. It's possible that as people upgrade to newer machines throughout the year, the data will even out and show a performance increase similar to past years. We may also be seeing the emergence of a new trend of performance stagnation that will become more clear as the year drags on. Time will tell.
