What happens when computers stop getting faster?
There's no obvious successor to CMOS on the foreseeable horizon, so it's good to see that IBM and others are searching for solutions.
Software will have to stop getting slower. >;-)
(1) As the ROI on R&D falls, R&D will be drastically cut and the industry will become even more commoditized. Less R&D spending means chips get cheaper.
(2) Capital equipment will last longer because it won't need to be replaced with new versions every couple years. Fewer equipment purchases means chips get cheaper.
(3) As performance/$ wanes, demand will fall in the short term. At first prices may crash if capacity is overbuilt, but in the medium term, production will stabilize at a smaller level than before. Because of economies of scale, prices will be higher at this smaller scale. (I believe this is what happened to the RAM market a few years ago.) This force may cause chip prices to rise.
(4) As software continues to improve, the value of chips will rise, even as the chips themselves stagnate. This will cause the market to grow, and economies of scale will drive prices down.
(5) As has been happening for years, the industry will continue to consolidate. Less competition between producers will mean higher profit margins and higher prices.
Overall, (1), (2), and (4) will lower chip prices and (3) and (5) will raise chip prices. But I think the overall trend will be lower prices, though perhaps not as the drastic rate to which we've become accustomed.
That's a fairly big assumption.
The history of performance speedup hasn't been solely due to doubling the transistors. Other types of architectural improvements in memory, buses, parallelism, multiple cores/threads have yielded performance doubling or more. Memory access has always been a huge latency and there are lots of ways to improve that without just making the transistors smaller.
We have a lot of work to do still! The majority of our computing has been on the x86 architecture, which basically stems from the 8080 which was designed in the mid 70s. We can still discover new and better architectures and materials. It's just the standard shrinkage of IC's that was the basis of Moore's Law originally has reached its limits.
But Xen is smaller than Linux.
It's slightly ranty but not entirely. First spreadsheets were used to fit in 64k.
For the average user an old laptop would do fine, in that area progress is self fulfilling marketing prophecy.
For enterprises .. maybe (the few I worked at had very low grade network and database infrastructure, so opportunity to evolve)
Hard science and medicine, they deserve smart and fast tech.