Intel hit a saturation point about 10 years ago and since then, clock speeds haven't increased much, nor have instructions per cycle I don't think is quite tru

Intel hit a saturation point about 10 years ago and since then, clock speeds haven't increased much, nor have instructions per cycle I don't think is quite true - have you looked at the results? The difference in single-thread performance between a P4 and a Core i7 at the same clock rate is mind-blowing. We're talking like 500% over 10 years. Yeah, single-thread performance improvement has slowed down, but it's still there.