Slow down makes no sense unless there's a lot of time to kill.
Which there would not be if CPU progress had, in fact, plateaued.
Slowdowns take work and effort to implement.
That work was more than paid for by battery life.
Because we are living without maximum horsepower and we don't want the heat problems that we didn't used to have. In the past, it wasn't worth the bother, so we didn't do it.
It could be because running full bore means you can't put it in a laptop and that's where all the growth in PCs are right now? Why would you develop specialized laptop and desktop parts when you can just use the mobile parts on the desktop.
Also, where's exactly is the plateau you're referring to? It's difficult to follow your agruments when they muddle around so. CPU performance? Software performance? Some combination of the two?
The fact is, there was a day when running Facebook took all the power we had available. Those days are long gone.
What day was that? Other than Flash I can't think of a single web tech that strained systems. Why would anyone develop a consumer service that had a high performance requirement?
As for "massive performance increases" have you bothered to check about throughput versus response time? Most benchmarks are throughput oriented.
Your point here?
"Massive" has to be doubling every two years. We aren't getting that, even at the most optimistic.
LOL. Thank you for defining my terms for me.
But, my argument isn't that simple. It says that some apps will do well, others won't and that will matter. It says progress is no longer universal.
This has always been the case. You're making distinctions of the present that you're not making of the past. Your conclusions are flawed because you aren't comparing like to like.