> Computer perf was doubling from transistors getting smaller. But transistors can't get smaller than an atom. What did y'all expect would save you and keep thi

> Computer perf was doubling from transistors getting smaller. But transistors can't get smaller than an atom. What did y'all expect would save you and keep things going? We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec. The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen. Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.