Moore's law may hit a wall based on the manufacturing process required to lay down the traces to allow elelctron flow, and transistor size as well -- we were supposed to hit that wall in the early 90's but developed a new process that allowed the newer pentium processors. I forget exactly which, but it was a big breakthrough. Prior to that, it was considered impossible to go further, a lot like 28.8 kb modems represented the maximum amount of badwidth possible over a POTS line. then we got 33.6k, then 56.6k through compression and other algorithms. By then, we had availability of higher bandwidth that POTS, so we set aside further modem development and concentrated on these conduits. We had enough throughput now so we could develop the internet applications and data transfers we wanted, so we could focus on those.

In new PCs we can have 2 or more real or virtual processors coupled with a bus with sufficient bandwidth to allow memory operations that arent a bottleneck -- but I wonder if we are truly at a wall.

In a way, I hope we are. I think quantum computing is a real possibility soon, and it seemingly opens the door to the kind of breakthroughs we look for in AI, etc. Kind of like using a T1 line or bable in place of a modem; much higher throughput using atomic states over NP juntions to perform logic operations. I think the possibilities will truly seem endless for a while.


And we truly owe this to Babbage, The Transistor, and the Integrated Circuits. No Aliens needed.