At some point soon, Fab lines are going to become long term investments, instead of being depreciated in 5 years. Wafers won't get any larger, transistors won't get any smaller, and it'll be on our hands as programmers to tweak every last ounce of performance out of things again.<p>I know the "demo" scene folks are keeping the craft alive, and it gives me hope for the future.<p>Of course, an array of non-cached, non-optimized but very simple and low power processors in a grid can do a lot more work than a single instruction-reordering monster trying to make a single thread go ever faster.