As someone who has spent many years working with different cores and in the design of them, static, hand-optimization is never going away. Dynamic optimization

As someone who has spent many years working with different cores and in the design of them, static, hand-optimization is never going away. Dynamic optimization by the core involves deeper pipelines and/or speculative execution and/or many more gates, all of which takes up more area and power. You end up spending more energy than you save, and pretty much everything is power consumption (or cooling, which is essentially the same thing) limited these days. Super-optimization is intractable for large sequences. It's like trying to solve a chess game by brute force. Likewise for other compile-time optimizations - they're polynomial or worse. You at least need a human to design the structures with knowledge of how they're represented low level and how they'll end up being pumped. It needs someone to come up with better compiler algorithms before we can say for sure that hand-optimization will go away. Increase in CPU speed alone doesn't make it inevitable.