I'm having trouble finding it but there was an article a while back comparing mp3 speed gains from hardware and software. The hardware was getting better at the pace of Moore's law but the (de)compression speeds for mp3s were far outpacing it, showing that mp3 decoding optimizations were giving orders of magnitude more speedup.

I think this is a common trend for algorithms that are in wide use, where you have Moore's law like behavior on the hardware side and then also software optimizations that give their own order of magnitude speedups.