One point of view is that we are pretty close to optimal. Here is another perspective from: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 Kay says: Jus

One point of view is that we are pretty close to optimal. Here is another perspective from: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 Kay says: Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures. The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is — that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false. From my point of view garbage collection, JIT compilation, and late binding are valuable and the hardware is leaving to much to the VM's.