The proof of Proebsting's Law seems kind of silly because running a compiler with optimizations turned off wouldn't actually disable all the years of advancements of compiler technology. It seems quite reasonable that many compiler advancements have to be added at the same time as hardware support. That doesn't make them purely hardware contributions.

Also, the proof skips more than a few critical steps when it says "Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X" and then uses that number as a multiplier in the answer.