> Today there are likely only a few people in the world who truly understand what any particular CPU family is actually doing sufficiently to beat the compiler
I'm not sure that's true. There are hundreds of compilers in the world, being maintained by thousands of developers. Then there are all the JITs. And the people who make the standard library implementations. And performance critical stuff in game engines, OS kernels, hardware drivers, high-frequency trading. Then there's the embedded space. And then there's Fabrice Bellard.
My previous employer, Cambridge Silicon Radio (one of hundreds of similar companies nobody's heard of) had dozens of people on the staff that worked on this kind of thing. I have friends at ARM, Broadcom, Samsung and Raspberry Pi that mess around with processor designs for a living. This is just my little experience of the industry. There are armies of these people.
I'm not sure that's true. There are hundreds of compilers in the world, being maintained by thousands of developers. Then there are all the JITs. And the people who make the standard library implementations. And performance critical stuff in game engines, OS kernels, hardware drivers, high-frequency trading. Then there's the embedded space. And then there's Fabrice Bellard.
My previous employer, Cambridge Silicon Radio (one of hundreds of similar companies nobody's heard of) had dozens of people on the staff that worked on this kind of thing. I have friends at ARM, Broadcom, Samsung and Raspberry Pi that mess around with processor designs for a living. This is just my little experience of the industry. There are armies of these people.