> But if that's the case, what's the point in all that extra-complexity in the CPU, if in the end the benefits seem to be miniscule? They aren't. 10 years ago,

> But if that's the case, what's the point in all that extra-complexity in the CPU, if in the end the benefits seem to be miniscule? They aren't. 10 years ago, single thread performance was achieved by upping the core frequency. That trend died when it hit physical limitations and we're stuck with 4-5 GHz ever since. In order to get more performance, all these tricks (caches, speculative execution, data-parallelism, etc.) had to be employed in addition to more cores. In audio processing this means that a modern laptop can process more effects and tracks than a beefy workstation could in 2011. Sure, each single effect still taxes the CPU pretty bad; but in contrast to 2011 this means you can easily run dozens in parallel without breaking a sweat or endless fiddling with buffer sizes to keep latency and processing capability in balance.