I see it more being about power profiles and Moores Law than anything else in respect to how Desktops are tapering and laptops are still going with tablet / phone going strong. The plateau is around a 2.5ghz dual core that supports the bangs and whistles when appropriate, be they branch prediction or atomic math or layered caches. The laptop space is now getting there, the tablet space is still 2 years out from that, and Desktops hit it 4 years ago. The reason is that the Desktop system could push out 125 watt cpus consistently without a hitch. Today, the real inroads in the Desktop space are not in core count (which nothing consumer grade saturates) frequency (which hit the ceiling on Silicon) or "cheats" (using transistors to accelerate instruction handling) they are coming out in significantly lower TDP demands. The modern i7 chip runs at 77 watts where the 920 in the article runs at 130 watts.

Meanwhile, laptops are maintaining their 20 - 40 watt profiles but are gaining performance. They are converging to that low power threshold. The tablet space is even lower, down to 5 watts in some cases, averaging from 3 to 10, but still, that is a convergence point.

It also doesn't hurt that AMD tripped over their own feet for a while and Intel is resting on its laurels pumping out higher performant CPUs without AMD to compete with at the high end.

Meanwhile, the graphics card business is heating up, the 7000 and 600 cards are upwards of 30 - 40% faster than the previous generation at much lower TDP, the Kepler architecture is extremely vector processing optimized to a fault in that it is worse as a gpgpu device than the 500 series, while the AMD Southern Islands chips are very generic cores optimized for GPGPU when their last few generations were graphics optmized, but in both regards they are markedly higher performant and consume much less power than many older gpus.

The advances are still there, they are just going in divergent directions. Nothing is stopping Intel from making a 32 core i7 with hyperthreading on a 500mm die besides the heat associated costs and tremendous production costs, but nothing on the market would utilize that. So they invest elsewhere.

The next generation of consoles isn't looking so bright either - they all seem to be targeting AMD gpus, and the WiiU will probably be using a modified 68X0 and the Sony / Microsoft camps will use the 78XX cards. They even are considering using FPUs. The gaming performance on the new hardware won't be that radical as the last time because the lower margins means they can't make extremely customized gaming hardware like back in the RSX days.

I think we're in agreement here. There's plenty of advancement: it just isn't in desktop horsepower because that's not where the demand is. I never meant to imply there was no advancement on the desktop at all. I was just trying to get the gist of "advancement tracking demand" out there.

Same thing I'm saying. Just provinding the examples of how the Desktop is still moving forward :P