[saltcured]

Right, clock speed seems like a distraction to me.

A 20x reduction really isn't that significant in a historical context. Gray beards here have seen CPU performance increase by 200x or more over their computing careers since the late 80s or early 90s. And that is ignoring multicore/SMP gains.

I found this nice figure trying to summarize CPU performance trends over many decades: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CPU-performance-Historic...

Prognostication depends on other unstated assumptions about the market or fundamental technological limitations. Generally, I'd say that if the single CPU core trend was more flattened, we would have seen more emphasis on parallel methods including SIMD, multicore, and the kinds of GPGPU architecture we're already familiar with.

The kind of programming model that is at the heart of CUDA, OpenCL, etc is exactly what the high-performance numerical computing researchers were using back in the late 80s to early 90s when computers were much slower. They were simply applying it to exotic multi-socket SMP machines and networks of computers, rather than arrays of processors on a single massive chip.