TL;DR: PassMark has crunched its benchmark data and observed a drop in CPU performance so far in 2025, theorizing about whether this might be down to hardware, or software issues (such as ...

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.

PassMark recently released a CPU performance report that shows some interesting trends. They’ve been tracking performance on Windows PCs since 2008 by looking at benchmark scores from the best ...