As someone who has used computers since the early '90s even if you take away speculative execution CPUs are still ridiculously fast. The problem is that people

As someone who has used computers since the early '90s even if you take away speculative execution CPUs are still ridiculously fast. The problem is that people are doing very slow stuff on them (Python, Electron, layers upon layers of abstractions) and only getting away with it due to (sometimes) dangerous hacks. Let's look at a random processor, like, say, the Intel Pentium G3420. A budget CPU released in December 2013 (coming up on its 10th birthday), it's a duo core CPU with a 3.2 GHz clock speed. Now I don't know what your usecase is, not many problems are nicely parallelizable, however at the scale we're talking it doesn't really matter that much. Because 3.2 billion instructions is a really big number. Now don't get me wrong, a million is also a quite sizable number; while 1 dollar won't even buy you a loaf of bread a million dollars will buy you a real fancy house, but a billion goes even beyond that. For example if you live to be 85 years old and from the moment you are born until the moment you pass away you do a thousand calculations per hour, every hour of the day, every day of every year, you will have done 750 million calculations. That's less than a quarter of what that ancient budget CPU does _per second_. Unfortunately some people, when given access to such power, have a tendency to abuse it. And that's what leads us to things like a chat app taking 9 seconds to launch.