This is a good article and very much parallels what I teach my Scala students as their introduction to the course. I particularly appreciate the chart that you prepared. I have been noting 2005 as the year progress started dropping off but I see it's closer to 2010. One of the things which has most definitely made the CPU issues less of a problem is the continued rapid improvement of access times for all kinds of storage: cache, main memory, and "Disk." Indeed I hesitate to even use those terms now because the lines have, happily, become so blurred.