3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always be advances in chip design. It’s not just about speed, it’s also about thermals, power consumption and manufacture price to work out the TCO of mining.
I'm not an expert on chip design, but I would have assumed that there isn't a lot of room for improvements of ASIC mining chips, given that they are probably a straightforward implementation of the hashing algo used in Bitcoin (and that a few thousand+ times), in contrast to CPU design which is more dependent on other computing/hardware trends.
Also remember an ASIC miner will generally use more than it costs in electricity each year, so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability.
CPU design is more complex, but also has more people working in the space and has been going for longer. I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get because history shows usually those predictions end up being wrong. As a child I thought Super Mario 64 was as good as computer graphics were ever going to get...
That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the equipment you already bought though (and the topic was obsolete equipment).
> so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability
Yeah, that's a fair point.
> I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get
And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends, assuming that they will continue to hold. I wasn't saying that it won't get better from here on out, just that the extreme growth that was mostly fueled by quickly going through the existing nm process steps can't be sustained, and that from now on it will follow the same slowish pace as all chip miniaturization.
It means even more equipment to go obsolete when improvements come through - and more equipment deployed does not equal more bitcoins generated, so it is an issue of more hardware that will ultimately end up in landfill / being scrapped.
> And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends
Well I'm also sceptical of people who blindly assume progress won't be made. To quote someone in 2014 predicting what would happen to ASIC design...
> As an emerging field of IC design, bitcoin mining ASICs have experienced rapid evolution over the past two years. However, they cannot keep evolving and developing at the current rate.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-can-longer-ignore-mo...
Well, still, try see how profitable your 3 year old ASIC miner is today...