sorting and searching are like 50% of what the CPU ever does. the benefits of ground breaking improvements there are huge. makes me think of proebsting's law, I don't know if this applies here.
This is not true. Power and transistor wise most of what a CPU does isn't even about running instructions, it is instruction reordering, cache, speculation, prefetching, write queueing and other techniques to minimize the effects of memory latency.
Instruction wise this is not true either. Sorting is a O(N log n) problem and log n is never going to be above 64. A cpu spending lots of time sorting implies that it is constantly throwing away the sorted results.
