Used to be that chipmakers had "nanometers" as their metric. That changed in the mid2000s and, to be fair, we all knew it. Multicore became the buzzword for awhile; and asynchronous programming got a boost. Back in 2007 I recall async / await becoming a thing in conferences.
To the extent chips have gotten better, it's because they've gotten smarter: processes that can be pushed onto other chips, are pushed onto those other chips, for instance. Which moves some bottlenecks to bandwidth and latency, but those can be handled too.
Another nice little trick is caching, just like in your browser. First time you visit a website with a bunch of graphics, you download all those graphics, and display them. Takes a while. Second time, if those same graphics are there - why do it all again? Store it locally and let the browser toss 'em back up on your screen. Apparently microchips can store certain favoured routes, Intel since 2011; they don't have to run the same process twice in Minecraft, so they don't.
It's turning out that a smarter chip can be fooled (pdf). Welcome to SPECTRE, Mister Bond; do mind the lasers.
SPECTRE can, I take it, trick such a processor into taking the wrong route thus opening up data which it's not supposed to know, like a cached password. The hacker running SPECTRE now knows it too. pwnd!
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