In recent years not only has CPU performance been increased, but the efficiency in terms of power consumption per unit of work has greatly improved.

Even if the majority of users begin realize they have no practical use for top end CPUs with gobs processing power, everyone still benefits from higher efficiency CPUs. It reduces electric bills, simplifies cooling systems, allows for smaller form factors, etc. I think in the future the power efficiency will become more important as people start to care less about having the ultimate killer machine in terms of processing power. People are already performing actions on their mobile devices(iPhone, Blackberry, etc) which were possible only on a desktop in past years. The strict power requirements of these devices with tiny batteries will continue to demand improvements in CPU technology.

I'm waiting for the day when it is common to see completely passively cooled desktop computers, with solid state hard disks, no moving parts, sipping just a few watts of power without emitting a single sound.

I don't know how much bandwidth you were able to get out of yours, but using the Netgear ethernet over powerline device, I only get about 8Mbps as opposed to the *200Mbps* advertised. Though I'm not sure how they can claim to get 200Mbps from a 100Mbit Ethernet port. :-/ I measured the speed of my wireless router and it was still about twice as fast.

Apparently the performance of these varies wildly dependent on you home wiring.

You know how everyone wanted a Linux-based operating system that "just worked" on a wide variety of hardware with drivers for everything? And didn't throw a shit-fit if you moved the hard disk to a completely different machine and tried to boot it up? That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)

BIOS configuration is peristent...

What if a BIOS existed that could learn your hardware configuration, and optimize itself for that configuration. The first time you boot, it would try to detect every possible piece of hardware under the sun to find out what you have. Once it figured that out, it could possibly write to itself to remember those settings. Every subsequent boot would skip all the nonsense and only initialize the hardware you need. If you later need to change your hardware configuration, the BIOS could have an option to run super detect mode again by pressing a key during boot.

I'm not a BIOS programmer, but it at least seems to me that something like this could be technically feasible with today's technology.

If you RTFA, you can see they show the difference in boot time between the exact same build of 9.04, with only the filesystem differing.

The PCI bus is based on a 33MHz clock

Not connected with CES but related is the fact the Chinese government has declared its intention to force all digital phone makers to use a standard USB connector from the charger. That would mean that a single charger would do for all of your devices and would save an immense amount of wastage and frustration.

I never thought I'd say this, but: Three Cheers for the Chinese Government!