Computers are more than just it's CPU's # of Ghz's.
A top PC from 2004 might look like:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 C @ 3.24 Ghz - Northwood Core
512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400 Mhz)
160 GB Harddrive ATA-100
GeForce 6800
17" CRT Monitor
Now we would expect 8 times as much RAM and disk space. Far faster CPU's with for cores and a huge L2 cache. 4 - 8x as much RAM on a graphics card with 2700 GFLOPs vs 54 GFLOPs of processing power. And our monitors are both larger, lighter, and have a higher resolution. But, what's most interesting is we are far less CPU bound in 2009 than we where in 2004.
PS: A single i7 core would crush a Northwood Pentium 4 clock per clock even limiting it's self to the same instruction set. An 3.4GHz i7 has more floating point performance than a 2004 era graphics card (69 vs 54).
Note: I am ignoring the Prescott as it took a Prescott core overclocked to 5.2 GHz to soundly beat the performance of a 64-bit Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
The interesting thing to notice here, is that the biggest impact of all that improvement in hardware, when you look at it in a web context actually goes towards increased execution speed of javascript.
Most of the other advantages only come out when playing computer games or something like that.
I disagree. The biggest change over the last 5 years has to be that we're designing web content for mobile devices in a very serious way.
And that is due to many of the 'moore's law' advances that have relatively little to do with javascript execution. (Small-screen quality, cpu/gpu/memory speed, improved communications chips and infrastructure, etc)
In 2004 I was using a 2048x1280 display at 112 ppi. Today I can't find a screen over 100 ppi. So in pixel density we have actually gone backwards, except for laptops.
hi ppi IS useful. you don't need antialiasing software and such crap if you have hi ppi. personally, I would be able to find use for a wqxga (2560x1600) in a 14" or 15" laptop screen. And no, font size does not become tiny if one does not want this to be (although I want tiny fonts), with the new desktop technologies like microsoft aero or linux counterparts like plasma and compiz.
While pixel density obviously isn't making leaps and bounds, Apple's products are pretty consistently over 100 ppi (not to mention the iphone at 160 ppi):
My 2 year old 15 inch ThinkPad T61p is 1900 x 1200 which is 150ppi. And honestly I don't really want a higher ppi. Software that does not let you change the default fount size becomes almost unreadable. It all comes down to viewing distance and the further you sit from the screen the less useful high PPI becomes.
A top PC from 2004 might look like: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 C @ 3.24 Ghz - Northwood Core 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400 Mhz) 160 GB Harddrive ATA-100 GeForce 6800 17" CRT Monitor
Now we would expect 8 times as much RAM and disk space. Far faster CPU's with for cores and a huge L2 cache. 4 - 8x as much RAM on a graphics card with 2700 GFLOPs vs 54 GFLOPs of processing power. And our monitors are both larger, lighter, and have a higher resolution. But, what's most interesting is we are far less CPU bound in 2009 than we where in 2004.
PS: A single i7 core would crush a Northwood Pentium 4 clock per clock even limiting it's self to the same instruction set. An 3.4GHz i7 has more floating point performance than a 2004 era graphics card (69 vs 54).
Note: I am ignoring the Prescott as it took a Prescott core overclocked to 5.2 GHz to soundly beat the performance of a 64-bit Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4