Comment by branko_d

> The hardware is dirt cheap. Programmers aren't cheap.

That may be fine if you can actually improve the user experience by throwing hardware at the problem. But in many (most?) situations, you can't.

Most of the user-facing software is still single-threaded (and will likely remain so for a long time). The difference in single-threaded performance between CPUs in wide usage is maybe 5x (and less than 2x for desktop), while the difference between well optimized and poorly optimized software can be orders of magnitude easily (milliseconds vs seconds).

And if you are bottlenecked by network latency, then the CPU might not even matter.