May well be. I can't shake the feel that all performance we have gotten have been from smaller chip features allowing for more more heat headroom, and thus more

May well be. I can't shake the feel that all performance we have gotten have been from smaller chip features allowing for more more heat headroom, and thus more "waste" via out-of-order, all branches at once, massive caches, etc etc etc. And once we hit the brick wall that is electron leakage, RISC or CISC will mean crap all for performance pr watt. Never mind that in recent years both AMD and Intel has taken their offerings into the real of SoCs. AMD have largely lead the way, by moving more and more of what used to be the northbridge onto the CPU die. The only thing keeping both out of the mobile world seems to be price pr unit. Intel bled money to get Asian OEMs to use their mobile ATOMs rather than Chinese ARM based SoCs.