In the scheme of things, this is short term. Market incentives for pushing performance are currently minor, but will have increasing influence over the next decade. Factors such As processing power hitting physical limits and energy prices as a result of climate policy will force engineers to build more efficient systems.
I do not think we will see "processing power hitting physical limits" anytime soon. Moore's Law is not dead yet, it is a good question if it ever will be dead. As Jim Keller says, the only thing that is certain is number of people saying Moore's law is dead doubles every 18 months.
Eh...for single-threaded processing, I'd say Moore's Law is dead and has been dead for more than a couple CPU generations now.
What we're seeing now is massive parallelism, which means if your task is embarrassingly parallel, then Moore's Law is very much alive and well. Otherwise, no.
Moore's law is a statement about transistor count on an integrated circuit - there is no "Moore's law for single threaded processing". And transistor counts continue to double.
Yes, it has to die. In this universe things can only grow indefinitely by less than an n^3 factor, because that's as fast as the lightcone of any event grows. Exponential growth, no matter how small the factor, will eventually outgrow n^3.
Once we attain the limits of what we can do in 2 dimensions, we aren't that many exponential growth events from what we can achieve in 3. Or once we achieve the limits of silicon technology, we aren't that many exponential growth events from the limits of photonics or quantum or any other possible computing substrate. Unless we somehow unlock the secret of how to use things smaller than atoms to compute, and can keep shrinking those, we're not getting very much farther on a smooth exponential curve.
Sure, it has to die eventually, but the key phrase is anytime soon. But do we have any evidence it will during our lifetime? Or even our great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-child's lifetime?
