I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware).

I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is. Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware. Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant… My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.