I personally have my own idea for that: Sure, we have hit many walls, but I don't think that's the main reason for the slow down in CPU development. I think it'

I personally have my own idea for that: Sure, we have hit many walls, but I don't think that's the main reason for the slow down in CPU development. I think it's mostly because the R&D moved from making the CPU faster for making the CPU consume less, to follow the Laptop/Mobile market (as everyone loves/hates to say, every year is the year of the death of the PC). Also we're at the point where most of the very-requesting software isn't bottlenecked by the CPU, or where you can just throw more cores at the problem and solve it. And also software is starting to leverage GPU acceleration, which gives an huge boost when usable. And GPUs are getting a lot faster every new generation.