7 years ago I’ve purchased my current PC. It costed me about $1K at the moment.
What do we have today? I still can use this PC for everyday tasks, coding, video rendering and even moderate gaming. I don’t think that in 2009 I could use a 2002 PC for gaming or even regular tasks. They still manage to put more transistors in a CPU every year, but it seems useless. Cure my ignorance, please? 
Moors law: http://www.mooreslaw.org/
Yes in terms of mhz, ghz, etc., there is only so much you can do with silicone and copper.
They did start using gold as well in place of some of the copper since it conducts electricity faster.
However, it’s cheaper and more efficient to just add cores than to add more gold paths to a single core.
Also you should noticed that newer CPUs tend to produce less heat and use less power than the old ones to achieve the same or even slightly better performance.
Lower power consumption is great, but it’s hardly a killer feature for a regular user. There was a recent report from Intel - lifespan of an average PC is still growing, which is pretty bad for a hardware manufacturer. It will become more difficult to sell new i7s if all you can tell about them is that they’re more power efficient.
Depends on the user and the device. When I think about mobile devices its a great thing to not have to charge my device every few hours.
Yep, but still desktop apps like Autocad could always use more power.
But yeah, I think that mobile devices should stop using such powerful CPUs. Every goddamn evening in my bedroom: notebook>power socket, tablet>power socket, smartphone>power socket. Fortunately I don’t have smart watch. 
Speed in terms of Mhz, Ghz, etc. isn’t everything, applications like Autocad are SMP aware and benefit more from having multiple CPU cores, and even for some applications Multiple GPU’s.
I totally disagree - Lower power consumption is THE killer features for most users of laptops - Meaning Lower weight (smaller batteries), more stamnia, NO Fans making noise (or not needing it to be active all the time), smaller laptops with enough computing power, etc. etc.
For desktops, it’s different of course, but there you have some PRETTY insane Xeon chips now, not to mention Geforce GTX-1080 that is blowing its older brothers so far out of the water that they might actually hit the moon.
There is a reason why Intel only (or nearly only) focuses on power consumption and efficiency every second generation of new chips.
I don’t think you could have a full blown 6th gen. i7 running in a 12,5 inch laptop that weights less than a kg in 2009, or even in 2013 (aside from there were no 6th generation back then of course! hehe).
But you do have a point nonetheless: http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/
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I don’t think that you can put a full blown 6th gen i7 in laptop now either. Especially in one the weights under 1kg. New Macbooks run on crappy m-series. Good ol’ Macbooks Pro with quad-core i7 should be ashamed of their descendants.
HP spectre weights ~1.5kg, and its i7 is pretty downgraded.
Keep in mind that there alternatives like AMD which are performance wise not so fast as Intel machines but offers now good open source support for CPU and GPU drivers and does not have Intel ME which is a operating system the user has no control of directly on the CPU.
Perhaps this is a negative example what this progress looks like at least at intel.
AMD processors are good when it comes to their price. But in terms of overheating they are big hot furnaces.
Though AMD processors are used for every modern game console out there (maybe because of their price).
HP Spectre (2016 edition) is 1.1kg, but Asus Zenbook 3 is 910g and has an i7. Full-blown or not, it’s of course the “U” (i7-6500U) ones with lower power consumption and dual-core, but still an i7, and MUCH faster than the m-series (http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-6500U-vs-Intel-Core-M7-6Y75), even though it uses 3 times as much power as the m7.
Of course the 6500U is no 6500HQ, but it also only uses 1/3 of the power: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-6700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6500U
So it’s also about power, and enough bang for the power…
Well, the gap between m7 and i7-6500u is not that big. Still, why would you buy a 12-inch laptop for hardcore tasks? It is basically a typewriter with internet access. If i want to work on my laptop, I’ll buy Macbook Pro or Windows-based alternative. Anyway, a desktop is a better choice for office in 90% of cases (if you don’t attend any fancy business meetings).
The initial point of this topic was that I wanted to know, if there are any possible alternatives to modern processors, so PCs can get faster?