A lot of that comparative slowness was caused by mechanical storage, replacing it with parallel and lower-latency SSDs makes it a lot easier to get full use out

A lot of that comparative slowness was caused by mechanical storage, replacing it with parallel and lower-latency SSDs makes it a lot easier to get full use out of more and faster cores. It doesn't cost much to set up a system that's completely CPU-limited on OLAP database-like workloads these days. I suspect that as more software stops being optimized for ~10ms serial disk I/O with huge caches this will become more common and more and faster cores will be a big(er) deal.