The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways Not necessarily, at least not fo

The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways Not necessarily, at least not for single core performance. Even if you're willing to accept unbounded power consumption and waste heat, the die size of the CPU itself won't be increasing at the same rate. You fairly quickly learn that dissipating kilowatts of watts of heat from something as tiny as a CPU die (or, more accurately, one particular subset of functional units from in a CPU core) is awfully difficult. At some point, the CPU/GPU/etc need to be kept under a certain temp, which sets an upper bound on watts. So, no escaping watts/performance....