There have been lots of other performance improvements, but I think they're less visible than other stuff. The CRC instruction that got added in SSE4.2 seems to get fairly wide use in hashes and stuff like btrfs. I think rdrand, aes, and clwb are interesting ones as well. I guess power consumption is kind of another visible gain.

I think the biggest visible change recently though, at least as a software engineer, is the continuously lowering cost, increasing availability of, memory. I can literally store an entire project in memory and not have to worry about any network or disk bottleneck.