| Khuutra said: Does that mean we're potentially coming up against a physical limitation concerning the power and scale of classic computing? Like.... within the next few decades? |
Indeed. We will have to fight hard to have our classic computation implemented at those scales of a few nanometers, maybe use totally different hardware techniques that rely on quantum effects to achieve the same (classic) results.
To give you a timeline, we are talking of 22nm tech chips in 2011 (22nm being the size of a memory element). Ten years ago we were working at scales of 150nm, almost a 7x factor in size.
Thus, it's unlikely that we'll see the same factor of raw miniaturization in the next ten years that we've seen in the last decade, unless a radical breakthrough comes up. More probably, the race to small scales will level off, a bit like the race to many-GHz clocks has.
There are many other ways, of course, in which classic computing devices will improve. Many cores can be stacked like sandwiches, a recent proof of concept of a memristor could lead the way to more effcient, permanent memory chips and so on.
