Sure it is true. It isn't a tech journo writing a quick piece to get some clicks. I am quite cynical these days.

There hasn't been any competition in the Desktop CPU space for years until 2019.

Also clock rates haven't increased since the mid-2000s (there were 5ghz P4 chips). Clock rates being an indication of speed stopped being a thing back then when I could buy a "slower" clocked Athlon XP chip that was comparable to a P4 with a faster clock.

Also more stuff is getting offloaded from the CPU to custom chips (usually the GPU).

> We need developers who understand these new low level details as much now as we needed that kind of developer in the past.

I suspect that there will get better compiler and languages. I work with .NET stuff and the performance increase from a rewrite to .NET core is ridiculous.