Please provide even a single deluded fantasy in which the price/performance ratio for a particular piece of hardware or component in the hardware stack will not continue to trend in the direction of more bang for the buck.
I don't know if this counts as "deluded", but how about: resource exhaustion of raw materials required in hardware manufacture.
See, for example: http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/05/25/a-metal-scare... which talks primarily about LCD displays (we're fast running out of Gallium/Hafnium/Indium), but points out that copper is likely to get significantly more expensive throughout this century.
That's going to increase the price/performance ratio of practically everything.
Yep, that's a deluded fantasy all right. See "Ultimate Resource 2", "The Resourceful Earth", or "State of Humanity" by Julian Simon or "Earth Report 2000" by Ronald Bailey.
Silicon makes up much more of the cost of a computer than copper, its not even close. Silicon is >50 cents a gram, copper is less than a cent per gram.
That's what the significantly was all about. We're not really going to run out of silicon any time soon, but we actually might with copper.
At the moment, both those prices are strongly dominated by the cost of processing, I would imagine. At some point, it could well be the scarcity you're paying for with copper, though.
Scarcity increases price, and two orders of magnitude is hardly inconceivable.
"People always need a place to live so real estate/housing prices will always be going up. There is only a limited amount of land on the Earth, but the population continues to grow."
Yes, but I can't imagine any realistic scenario where this performance will start to backslide. The rate of performance increase will continue to slow down, and the number of cores that you get per unit will increase, but "the hardware" in the most general sense will keep getting faster and cheaper over time.
First, you said an upward trend - I submit that any meaningful upward trend in single core performance has ceased. Further, it has backslided in many cases. In order to increase the number of cores per processor, each core is getting simpler by reducing or eliminating single-threaded optimizations like branch prediction and out-of-order execution.
