I feel like we are unfortunately sitting on the tail end of the integrated circuit S-curve and are now waiting for the emergence of the next processing medium.
Actually I think both the processing capability and communication capability are almost reaching their limits regarding the sequential performance, I bet that's why multicore and bandwidth are what producers advocate, and also people are working hard to utilize the parallelism. Missing the good old days when 'faster' truly meant the sequential performance for CPU and latency for networking, and you could always get 'faster' by simply increasing the frequency...
Unfortunately? I find it fortunate that we are looking at the point in which companies have to go for truly revolutionary changes to processor technology.