[cpgxiii]

In many ways we've seen that return to dumber hardware + smarter compilers in the GPGPU realm, although even there the hardware continues to get more capable over time.

Those applications tend to work, though, on the basis that either the compiler is generating fat binaries to support multiple architecture versions (e.g. Cuda), or some sort of IR, or compilation happens at runtime (e.g. OpenCL). It doesn't really work if you want to generate single binaries that will work performantly on a wide range of hardware versions - particularly important for users answering "how will application X work on future hardware Y", which really gets in the way of general-purpose use.

That's really the great advantage of putting more smarts in the hardware - you can evolve the processor design (often to improve performance) while executing the same binaries.