Comment by cogman10

> single core performance has not improved.

Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid.

Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance.

And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a bunch of cores and turn them all off (or slow them down) to gain power efficiency.

Not to say the performance story would be vastly different with more focus on performance over efficiency. But I'd say it does have an effect on design choices.