A report by an independent group of science and technology advisers to the White House, published last December, cited research showing that performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.

The report cited a study of progress over a 15-year span on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the speed of completing the calculations improved by a factor of 43 million. A factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster processor speeds, but a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software algorithms.