I'm not in the hardware industry, and am curious what the future might hold.

We've been stuck in the 3-5 Ghz range for a long time. I think we're scaling by adding cache, cores, and specialized instructions. Due to observations like Amdahl's Law, PC hobbyists aren't seeing great returns on new machines. We've had 8+ logical cores for a long time now.

The physical size of gates in the CPU is getting very difficult and costly for companies to shrink further. We are approaching a scale where more quantum effects are at play, and there is actually a "minimum scale" for transistors. So where can we go from here? What will the effects of these changes (or lack thereof) be on software development?