If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof.
Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs.
Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I get wrong, I get 99 others correct.
What I think made people miss it is no one wanted to refactor their code to run efficiently on GPUs. It wasn't that hard to do so in a lot of cases but it was work.
And all this set the stage for deep learning. It was the opening act if you will...
CUDA offered a way to access a limited set of operations on special-purpose hardware with a rewrite of critical sections. A pretty far cry from 'boosting legacy code.'
Ha, this is just silly. Ok, so what percent were IBM promising? How do you ever reduce anything complicated into a percent change.
Mature and/or competitive.
20%+ without a breakthrough can absolutely happen in niche industries that have historically lacked competition.