Besides there being some further room to reduce element size, there is 3D chip stacks—between these two factors, there should be at least a couple more possible doublings of processor power down the line. I haven’t run the math to estimate the theoretical limits.
Well, others have computed the limits. The 3rd reference links to a full article deriving the limits permitted by the laws of physics.
Seth Lloyd calculated the computational abilities of an “ultimate laptop” formed by compressing a kilogram of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485 × 10^-27 meters, concluding that it would only last about 10^-19 seconds before evaporating due to Hawking radiation, but that during this brief time it could compute at a rate of about 5 × 10^50 operations per second, ultimately performing about 10^32 operations on 10^16 bits.
“Rather serious cooling issues” is an accurate characterization, but current electronic packaging technology does very little with direct liquid cooling—there’s room to take the heat out if we can crack the theoretical challenges. You would only need to boil a few grams of liquid per second to take off kilowatts of power.
It will eventually “end” if we count switching to any non-semiconductor technology as ending it. I don’t have a strong opinion as to how long it will last.
I certainly hope that Moore’s Law will end, but I don’t think we could get that lucky.
Besides there being some further room to reduce element size, there is 3D chip stacks—between these two factors, there should be at least a couple more possible doublings of processor power down the line. I haven’t run the math to estimate the theoretical limits.
Well, others have computed the limits. The 3rd reference links to a full article deriving the limits permitted by the laws of physics.
You’re not going to get that with silicon technology in the next twenty years, though—that’s the more urgent question.
I agree—I was just answering the question of what the ultimate, inviolable limits are, to establish when the improvements have to stop.
I recall hearing that 3D chips would have some rather serious cooling issues but I suppose that isn’t an obviously unsolvable problem.
“Rather serious cooling issues” is an accurate characterization, but current electronic packaging technology does very little with direct liquid cooling—there’s room to take the heat out if we can crack the theoretical challenges. You would only need to boil a few grams of liquid per second to take off kilowatts of power.
It will eventually “end” if we count switching to any non-semiconductor technology as ending it. I don’t have a strong opinion as to how long it will last.