We sort of had two phases of development: - Running up single-core performance through increasingly sophisticated core design and clock speed (which is now at

We sort of had two phases of development: - Running up single-core performance through increasingly sophisticated core design and clock speed (which is now at the 5% per year point mentioned) - Going wider by throwing more SMT, more cores, and larger caches at the problem. Assuming here that x86 was the last major architecture that was going for high single-thread performance at all costs, the first phase lasted us a good 30 years-- from the 4004 to the flameout of Netburst. We could consider the second phase starting when they started delivering the P4 with Hyperthreading, and its true-dual-core predecessors shortly thereafter, so we're now about 20 years into that era. Do we have another 10 left in it?