https://stoneridgetechnology.com/company/blog/the-exponentia...
The rest of the article is concerned with how software today is still written for those "serial" processors in-mind and fails to take advantage of parallel computing hardware - but this is hardly a new nor controversial statement.
My argument was simple: 20 years ago nobody cared about performance because of the strong correlation between Moore Law and MFLOPS and performance in general.
Nowadays with multicore, individual CPU cores are becoming slower, not faster. Then we can't just wait 18 months for individual cores to get faster.
Today we need to write better software.
No, that's not what I said: I'm saying that single-threaded performance is no-longer directly (let alone linearly) correlated with transistor count, and hasn't been for decades - but it's single-threaded performance that matters for most end-user applications on peoples' computers/smartphones/etc.
And Moore's Law makes no claims about performance increases either, only transistor density. It's literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:
> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend.
The link to performance (any kind of performance: parallel or serial) was made incorrectly by another Intel executive, David House, but that assumption simply isn't true.
To summarize: *yes*: bleeding-edge IC transistor density generally doubles every 18-24 months, but this does not translate into any kind of performance-doubling in end-user applications. In fact, on the contrary, perceived "performance" (however you define it) outside of parallelizable programs, has demonstrably stagnated.
Single-threaded performance has long-since effectively plateaued: it's 2023 now and a desktop computer built 10 years ago (2013) can run Windows 11 just fine (ignoring the TPM thing) - but compare that to using a computer from 2003 in 2013 (where it'd run, but poorly), or a computer from 1993 in 2003 (which simply wouldn't work at all).
This is not to say that there won't be any significant performance gains to come, such as with rethinks in hardware (e.g. adding actual RAM into a desktop CPU package, non-volatile memory, etc) but I struggle to see how typical x86 MOV,CMP,JMP instructions could be executed sequentially any faster than they are right now.