Single-thread is really hard, we've basically saturated our l1 working set size, adding more doesn't help much. Trying to extend the vector length just makes physical design harder and that reduces clock speed. The predictors are pretty good, and Apple finally kicked everyone up the ass to increase OOO like they should have.

Also, software still kind of sucks. It's better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.

Flash was the epochal change, maybe we have some new form of hybrid storage but that doesn't seem likely right now, Apple might do it to cut costs while preserving performance, actually yeah I see them trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Otherwise I don't know, we need a better way to deal with GPUs, there's nothing else that can move the needle, except true heterogenous core clusters, but I haven't been able to sell that to anyone so far, they all think it's a great idea, that someone else should do.

Even beyond that, short of something like blender, Windows just can't handle that kind of horsepower, it's not designed for it and the UI bogs down fairly fast.

Linux, otoh, I find can eat as much CPU as you throw at it, but often many graphics applications start bogging down the X server for me.

So I have a windows machine with the best GPU but passable cpu and a decent workstation gpu with insane cpu power on linux.