This is not that impressive I think. Let's round 11 years to 12 (= 8*18 months). Moore's law says that the power would be multiplied by 2^8=256. The reality of your benchmark is 696 (sorry, not the extrapolation at 1740 you did). And in 11 years and 3 major versions, it is reasonable to assume that Frederik has increased the performance of his calculation engine by a factor 3. 3*256=768 > 696. QED
Hmmm, using a full 10/4 *is* probably cheating a little because when substantially less than full CPU power is used even these cores have auto-speedup, just not quite as much as the I7's, however I'll stand by my ow belief that *3 is a gross over-estimate of how much more optimum the actual UF code is - one reason being that it had very little potential for improvement in the first place as even UF2 was so good and secondly any improvements made in speed from one version of UF to another have been accompanied by increased sophistication which itself knocks the speed a little,,,in fact I have v3, v4 and v5 on my PC here....just a mo'....
OK here are the render times on my WinXP 3GHz P4HT for "Aquamarine" at the default size (640 wide) within UF (I downloaded and tried V2 as well)
UF2 87 secs
UF3 65 secs
UF4 63 secs
UF5 58 secs
Render time on this system at the same size in UF5 is 1.4 secs, but of course back in 2000 I didn't even have a P4HT in fact we're probably talking around 200MHz tops for the CPU speed - and of course no hyper-threading which gives a factor of around 15*1.5 = 22.5* slower than a P4HT (assuming a 1.5* speed-up for the HT) - that gives an approx speed up within UF from 2000 to now of 22.5*58/1.4 = 932 which is lower than my 1640 estimate probably because of difference between rendering within UF and disk-rendering.
I am also cheating a bit because this system is more "up-to-date" for now than the system I had in 2000/2001 was for the time - I suspect it was only a 200MHz "Pentium MMX" so I guess you'd have to adjust the date for the old render time to about 18 months after such PCs were first in PC World etc.