[Haskell-cafe] Specialized Computer Architecture - A Question

[OWP]

Hi,

I was reading the paper "A History of Haskell: being lazy with class" (
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/History_of_Haskel) and came on a section
(I 2.1) which briefly explained the work people did on making non-von
Neumann architectures.

It concluded by saying

"Much (but not all) of this architecturally
oriented work turned out to be a dead end, when it was later dis-
covered that good compilers for stock architecture could outper-
form specialised architecture. But at the time it was all radical
and exciting."

These "stock architectures", were they really so good that they out
performed the specialized ones on it's own merits or was this mainly due to
Moore's Law on transistors?  In other words, suppose we separate Moore's
Law from the stock architecture, would it still outperform the specialized
ones?

Thank you for any response
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