Sure. The core of any particular implementation of an arithmetic operation isn't going to get faster with more transistors, but: 1) There is "stuff" before and

Sure. The core of any particular implementation of an arithmetic operation isn't going to get faster with more transistors, but: 1) There is "stuff" before and after the arithmetic operation that matter such as pipelines, cache pre-fetch and instruction branch prediction; 2) There is more than one way to implement an arithmetic function (such as an adder) if you have more/cheap/free transistors, such as the carry look-ahead adder[1]. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/dragonpradeep/carry-look-ahead-adder http://www.slideshare.net/dragonpradeep/carry-look-ahead-add...