Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices. Although I think we still have a lot of headroom in terms of memory performance that will matter just as much as the previous CPU performance increases.
> Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices.
"Capitalism" (the free market) is us. And I for one do "hate" that CPU performance is not increasing as rapidly as it did in the past. I would very much like to see a return of significant generational performance improvements. I would happily upgrade my PC more often if it resulted in the significant gains of yesteryear.
I find it a curious asceticism to cherish stagnant technology because it means my 5-year old PC is still relevant. Yeah, that's the silver lining. But let's be real: if you had a PC that was twice as fast in every performance dimension that I could afford today, I would buy it.
Companies that get a competitive advantage or can command a premium from selling long lived products don't hate it at all. It's the core of their business model.
If the longevity of a product is a selling point, can provide a competitive advantage or help capture a premium then Capitalism is absolutely fine with it.
I can see it now: "Facebook now offers faster news feed rendering for PCs equipped with Intel 10 series FPGAs!"
Kidding of course, but I think the FPGA/CPU combos will be more relevant to servers than end users, at least initially. FPGA high level synthesis is miles away from being useful for consumer level application acceleration, and GPUs are much more accessible