"Reached their limits" - I feel like I've heard this many many times before.
Not that I doubt it, but just I've also been impressed with the ingenuity that folks come up with in this space.
Not that I doubt it, but just I've also been impressed with the ingenuity that folks come up with in this space.
Single chip processors have not reached their limits in terms of . For some applications, one piece of silicon is not enough, and that has been true for ever. Early cores were built with multiple chips, later ones had separate cache or FPU add ons, we had (and still have) SMP multi-processors that wire up many chips together, we have discrete GPUs.
So in any given year, with any given silicon technology and logic design, we have virtually always reached the limit of single chip processors, and gone beyond them with multiple chips. And at the same time, the limits of single chip processors have continued to expand year after year.
Both of these things remain true. Relative performance improvements have slowed significantly from where they were 20-30 years ago, but things are still ticking along.
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years."
- attributed to von Neumann, 1949.
that speech is about 80 years old nowadays. There was plenty of room at that time.
Of course, it also speculated that we would move into quantum computers at some point, what is still a possibility, but now we know that quantum computers won't solve every issue.