What's interesting is that with the death of Moore's Law there's a sudden increased interest in accelerators (software or hardware assisted), specialized pieces

What's interesting is that with the death of Moore's Law there's a sudden increased interest in accelerators (software or hardware assisted), specialized pieces of software/hardware that can perform certain tasks really fast and then integrating these in a PC system to boost performance of certain common tasks. Thus I found myself having to spend a lot more time lately learning how cache affects the code I write, branch prediction, speculative execution, etc. It feels like starting out learning to program all over again.