There's more to the lack of radical new applications than faster single core performance. We've had increasingly multi-core systems for over a decade now, but

There's more to the lack of radical new applications than faster single core performance. We've had increasingly multi-core systems for over a decade now, but applications have been slow to appear. We've also had increasingly powerful GPUs with compute capability over that time. I think even if single core performance were still increasing at 50% or even 25% per year we'd still be here. Sure, it requires work to move off the legacy single-thread paradigm but it's also the economics of the software business these days. When you combine the increased control/lockdown by the mainstream platform owners and the decreasing willingness of customers to pay for software in the era of no-cost software, there isn't much incentive for new applications to appear. Notice that all of the major players are mostly focused on services and server side for the heavy lifting these days. It's not because the user hardware can't do it (hell, on the server side, CPUs and GPUs tend to be less powerful per-core), it's that it makes more economic sense for them to not bother doing interesting things on the users device.