You'd think there are enough universities working on research processor architectures that a 10x would have popped up by now, if you can theoretically make a 10

You'd think there are enough universities working on research processor architectures that a 10x would have popped up by now, if you can theoretically make a 1000x one. I'd rather point the blame on software: If we were banging on hardware directly like in the 70s, we'd probably see a massive performance boost, too… just hope that your customers accidentally happen to have the hardware you optimized for and don't want to run anything else on it.