Modern CPUs (since around 2000) go faster in large part because they have multiple cores that can do more than one thing in a time. If your program needs to go faster using more cores is often your best answer and then you will need these tricks. (SIMD or the GPU are also common answers that might or might not be better for your problem)

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yjftsjthsd-h an hour ago | parent [-]

Modern CPUs can do 4-5 GHz singled threaded. (Sometimes you can even get a higher clock speed by disabling other cores.) This somewhat outpaces "a 1mhz 6502" even without parallelization.

	▲	bluGill an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They can, but nobody runs a single process on such CPUs. They run some form of OS which implements spinlock, mutexes, and all these other complex things. I suppose someplace someone is running an embedded system without an OS on such a processor - but I'd expect they are still using extra cores and so have all of the above tricks someplace.