This is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded (turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on the die.
But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.
For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.
The (single threaded) performance improvement is significantly larger. Anandtech has 2005 vintage Pentium in their benchmarks: http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836 and there is probably a significant perf difference between 2002 and 2005.
And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There are your 100x differences
But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.
For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.