This sounds like it involves a lot more high-level knowledge than I would be able to intelligibly level at it! Or level at it at all, I suppose.

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?

The limitations have been know for a long time, that is why scientist have allways been looking for an alternative, google Qubits and check that out.

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.

The 'end of Moore's law' has been predicted by analysts to be about 10 years away for as long as consumer CPUs have existed. But the rate of progress has yet to slow down.

It will actually be cost, not technology, that limits advancement. With the next generation (22nm), only the big three of Intel, TSMC and Globalfoundries will be able to afford to convert a fab plant to the node and be able to make back the money. Other chip designers will have to use one of those three for fabrication. And the costs will climb even faster in future.

Further shrinkage past 16nm or so will require a rethink of what it means to make a transistor (as in this seven-atom example, or using electron spin or photons instead of electron charge to record the state). But classical computing will endure independent of what's going on at the micro-level, because most computational tasks we're familiar with don't work well with quantum logic.

As an example of what I think will happen, WereKitten is right in saying that quantum effects will interfere with the accuracy and certainty of calculations. I think we'll see a chip which runs any classical task say ten times in parallel, and then takes the most common result. Still though - would any business use a CPU which is only 99.9999% accurate, considering how many individual operations are required (i.e. trillions)?

The next generation consoles will have to be very careful about the heat budget they allocate at the start of the generation because there will not be very many easy shrinks available past the 22nm node. If they start with a too hot console which uses too much power they will not have very many easy ways to fix it unlike this generation. They will likely start with a much lower 100-150W power budget vs the ~200W or more we saw this generation with the PS3.

Wow!

between that and the recent advances in Graphene technology ( http://tiny.cc/17jmf) nanotubes and light based computing (http://tiny.cc/jr1m9) the future of computing looks bright.

this site bugs so much... I just replied and... nothing...