80/20 rule comes into effect as well. Without a monumental change in the structure of CPUs, we will only be seeing small steps in performance for the foreseeable future. 5% improvement a generation is good, I am not complaining, but even if there are twice as many transistors in a CPU without the instruction set to take advantage of them and the software written with utilizing the available resources, it's nearly a moot point.
I believe we're long past the point where a clock speed boost or a new instruction set can generate any huge leaps in processing power over a single generation, and I would go so far as to say that there is very little practical difference between, say a 6th gen core i7 and an 11th gen i7 from the end users perspective.
