But you can still speed things up with shiny tricks like speculative execution...
...and here we are.
Speculative execution (Branch Prediction) is hardly flashy. It's been present in Intel chips (Pentium) (and just about everyone else) since the early 90s (a quarter of a century ago). This was back when die resolution was 600 nm.
Right, my point was that they're doing more than just reducing the nm.