Clearly, the complexity of modern-ish CPUs does push up instructions/cycle — and thus single-threaded performance. That said, I did an awful lot on machines ru

Clearly, the complexity of modern-ish CPUs does push up instructions/cycle — and thus single-threaded performance. That said, I did an awful lot on machines running at hundreds, rather than thousands, of MIPS (and quite a bit at single digits...). If the “big core” superscalar designs hadn’t happened, it’s not at all clear to me that the world would be a worse place. Perhaps we’d have more transputer-like designs, for instance (which I admit bring their own complexity — but could at least be rather more transparent than the current mess of speculation and complex cache hierarchies.)