[sir_bearington]

Except we don't. Where's my single-core 100GHz processor?

Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.

[rictic]

Scaling may take us to some strange places, but it's worth noting that an Apple M1 chip has >100x the transistors of a 2004-era Pentium 4, and achieves ~500x the FLOPs at a fraction of the power draw.

Yes this isn't single-threaded performance, but I think we should keep in mind that exponential improvement in price/performance over many decades is possible, if never certain.

Sources - https://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Computing/Computing_Power... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1