You're actually consistent with what I had in mind. A 3 year old quad core is 2-3 times faster than a 9 year old dual core, in most of the embarrassingly parall

You're actually consistent with what I had in mind. A 3 year old quad core is 2-3 times faster than a 9 year old dual core, in most of the embarrassingly parallel benchmarks. I.e. despite all the process improvements, computing power per core stagnated. Personal computers mostly remain at two cores, four accessible at a premium. Personal computers are simply fast enough and the progress is better used by moving more pieces off the motherboard onto the CPU. If someone needs more power, then he's considered to be building a workstation or a server and charged way more than for personal stuff. I have no clue if you're right about arm progress saturating, I haven't been following that.