#Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law - NYTimes.com
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law
performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.
(...) study of progress over a 15-year span on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the #speed of completing the calculations improved by a factor of 43 million. Of the total, a factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster #processor speeds, according to the research by Martin Grotschel, a German scientist and mathematician. Yet a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software #algorithms.