To clarify, the problem is not 'clocks give X% improvement to performance, but architectural improvements give Y%, and Y is bigger than you give it credit for.'

To clarify, the problem is not 'clocks give X% improvement to performance, but architectural improvements give Y%, and Y is bigger than you give it credit for.' The problem is that CPU performance is not practical to reason about for humans. Hasn't been and probably won't ever be until/unless computers get massively rearchitectured. The speed-of-light limit means that 'fast' memory (accessible within a couple of clock cycles) will always be limited, and 'big' memory (gigabytes-terabytes size) will always be at least 100 cycles delayed. This in turn means that the cpu architecture must be asynchronous, which means it does not have consistent or intuitive performance characteristics.