Superscalar processing was unfortunately a major step forward in terms of performance. The answer in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8389648/how-do-i-achie

Superscalar processing was unfortunately a major step forward in terms of performance. The answer in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8389648/how-do-i-achieve-the-theoretical-maximum-of-4-flops-per-cycle/8402970 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8389648/how-do-i-achieve... is interesting; I'm particularly fascinated by the temperature warning (the answer author's CPU got to 76C in testing). My CPU's sitting at 30C right now. It maybe climbs to 48C if Chrome's being stupid, and 50+C if I'm doing something mildly taxing. I've never made it go beyond 60C IIRC. So, modern CPUs are so efficient that they're simply just never hitting their maximum throughput. I think that's pretty incredible. The sad thing about CPUs that don't use modern (superscalar, multi-stage, microarched, etc) design is that they just can't keep up. And people's OCD about speed and (more frequently) parallelization nowadays drives what they'll buy. Something had better have a killer feature if it isn't fast or highly parallel. So it's possible, but a huge headache. Whatever you built would likely be highly purpose-specific.