Designing Customized “Brains” for Robots

> “I was thrilled with those results,” says Neuman. “Even though we were hamstrung by the lower clock speed, we made up for it by just being more efficient.”

So besides the lampoon-ability of this article as inventing new words for old concepts (hardware acceleration) which I am not qualified to lob (and therefore only hint at ;) ), how much more software efficiency is out there to 'mine' out of standard CPU/RAM/Storage Von Neumann-style computing devices?

Some people claim that moving things from Electron to native would be a huge speedup, and I don't disagree with that, somehow a Windows 98 box provided 95%+ of today's computing experience (I can't speak for older things like Amigas, Apple ][s/Lisas/etc) at like 1% of the computing power.

But what do I know, maybe all the software efficiency in the world has been wrung out and there is no more low-hanging fruit? And/or that is the case for robotics but not for general computing.