Some yeah, but many of these optimizations aren't across-the-board performance improvements, but rather specializations that favor specific kinds of workloads.

Some yeah, but many of these optimizations aren't across-the-board performance improvements, but rather specializations that favor specific kinds of workloads. There are the really obvious ones like on-board GPUs and AI accelerators, but even within the CPU you have optimizations that apply to specific kinds of workloads like specialized instructions for video encode/decode. The main "issue", such as it is, is that this setup advantages vertically integrated players - the ones who can release software quickly to use these optimizations, or even going as far as to build specific new features on top of these optimizations. For more open platforms you have a chicken-and-egg problem. Chip designers have little incentive to dedicate valuable and finite transistors to specialized computations if the software market in general hasn't shown an interest. Even after these optimizations/specialized hardware have been released, software makers often are slow in adopting them, resulting in consumers not seeing the benefit for a long time. See for example the many years it took for Microsoft to even accelerate the rendering of Windows' core UI with the GPU.