[nippoo]

One of the big things this article fails to mention is that TDP/heat budget is way more of a constraint than number of transistors - at small feature size, silicon is (relatively) cheap, power isn't.

There's no way you can use 100% of your CPU - it would instantly overheat. So it suddenly makes even more sense to have optimised hardware units for all sorts of processes (h264 encoding, crypto etc) if you can do a task any more efficiently than basic logic.