Are there hardware startup companies that designs a new CPU/GPU that interrupts the status-quo. (3GHz in 2004, 3.8GHz in 2006, ~4GHz in 2014)
We had some in the 1990s like 3dfx (GPU) and Cyrix (CPU):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix
We had a discussion about it (as off-topic discussion) today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658275