The 60 mV/dec limit applies to all materials, not just silicon. Beating it will require a fundamentally different type of operation. Agree that changes in materials will require massive investment and learning.
There are transistor designs that can subvert the subthreshold swing limit, see NC-FETs and TFETs.
Sure, but many materials have much higher electron and hole mobility than silicon has.
He's talking about the Boltzmann limit of MOSFETs
Carbon nanotube transistors would be great if we could get them to form reliably instead of having 10% of the transistors fail to form.
Diamond transistors have been demonstrated in the lab in the 90's already.
Graphene. The material of the future.
TeraHertz CPUs would be nice.
Crank them up a little more and they will glow due to reaching visible light territory :)
Perhaps leading to little pixel-sized photovoltaic cores that absorb light on one side, do a bit of computation at 400-800 THz and emit light on the other side, merging the display with the CPU. I've heard that VR goggles with 8K resolution per eye would be approaching the limit of the human eye's resolving power, which would be about 66 million cores.
Crank them up a little more and they will go into deep ultraviolet. Problem solved.
There is no problem here, marketing folks would love it :)