My desktop computer has 64GB of memory, 1TB NVMe (SUPER fast sequential read) storage, and my Ryzen has 12 cores. Yet most of this sits unutilized, even while doing heavy workloads. There's a lot of extra performance just sitting out there if we throw the book of default assumptions about hardware away.
What do you mean by throw default assumptions about hardware away? It is just sitting unused, but don't we need apps that need or can use that performance? I only ever use full cpus while rendering and a lot of memory can be needed there, but really not so much. The stuff that can use full usage is designed that way and the stuff that doesn't can't probably get much faster spread over cores?
Mantle, followed by Vulkan and all, threw out the assumptions about cpu/gpu starving that were made in the 90s to adapt to modern hardware, extracting sometime massive performance boost "simply" by changing the API.
Right now you have RTX IO (nvidia) and DirectStorage (direct x) who aime to extract massive disk IO performance boost from modern NVMe drive for gaming by throwing away assumptions made about them in pre-ssd times and providing a new API.
These change often come down to the same thing: the way we call them, the amount of locking and round trips we do, synchronous or not, the connecting interfaces and their own speed limits, ... Rules made in an era were drive were X orders of magnitude slower than RAM start limiting us when X has been divided by two or three.
The fact that it is sitting idle means it is doing a good job at handling your processing needs. Imagine if it wasn't fast enough (e.g. in deep learning). Waiting for your computer isn't fun.