as it turns out there is a lot of optimizations to be had besides feature size shrink. for a long while, both software and hardware were sustaining of the "free

as it turns out there is a lot of optimizations to be had besides feature size shrink. for a long while, both software and hardware were sustaining of the "free lunch" of Moore's law (as coined by Herb Sutter). With that fading away, there has been a lot of progress on the architecture side in the last couple of years, with AMD & Apple entering a previously stale desktop CPU market and mixing it up quite a bit, forcing Intel to also be competitive again. I think it will be quite a while until the train of improvement runs dry even when feature size will be stuck. Think about how inefficient today's software still is when compared to what e.g. the original Mac could do with its limited hardware.