I think you can argue that may be caused by performance stagnation. When the CPU market is not advancing in performance, software is not going to advance in com

I think you can argue that may be caused by performance stagnation. When the CPU market is not advancing in performance, software is not going to advance in computational requirements. You can see a counter-example in mobile phones. Their processors are continuing to make considerable strides in power-constrained performance, and 2-3 year old phones regularly wind up getting perceptually slower as the software advances in performance requirements.