I'll just point out that a wimpy low power processor that costs less than a buck has as much processing power as a 486. And the amount of processing tends to be on small amounts of data in short bursts.
Big problem as I see it is compiler writers using C++ with it's completely broken language and compilation model. Of course they think speed is the only important metric because C++ compilers compiling C++ compilers is very very slow. And they're dealing with trusted data 100% of the time and not the guys desperately trying to patch a zero day vulnerability at 2am.
