Congratulations, I thought I'd managed to go a whole year without hearing about process limits and the grim future we face. Seriously, every 6 months or so for the last 15 years or more there is an article published explaining the end of the PC revolution. Google the terms "end of silicon" or "end of moore's law" and add a custom date range like 1998-1999 and you'll get dozens if not hundreds of articles from reputable sources saying that we've come to an impasse or that in 3, 5 or 10 years we will be screwed.

When chips started hitting the limits of the photo-lithography process, they switched to lasers, UV, DUV, and now EUV. Transistors start leaking so they redesign them time and time again. We've gone from completely 2D Circuts to 2 layer 3D to what's it at now 16 layers? The end is nigh and has been since Moore came up with that god damn law.

My point is that there's a lot a really brilliant people in the field who've been working for years if not decades to address problems we haven't even had yet. We're perpetually on the verge of a crisis, and simultaneously on the verge of a solution to said crisis.

We're in an age of ridiculously powerful machines that we don't know what to do with. If suddenly all progress halted in chip development and we had to make due, we'd probably enter into an age of hyper optimization where software engineers would be scrutinizing every clock cycle furthering the annual performance gains we've had for the last 40+ years.

perhaps you didn't look at the atoms in the picture I linked.

At 4nm no amount of dielectric will save you from the quantum tunneling.

I'm not suggesting a solution, I'm simply stating that lots of brilliant people have been aware of this eventuality and have been actively working on next generation processes to address it.

if "next generation processes" is really the best you can come up with...

Those people are working on EUV at ASML. Those are the next generation processes. What you're suggesting is they have some super science quantum-tunneling barrier that the world has never heard of nor seen nor thought could exist.

why? he waved his hands and said exponential growth will continue, citing the fact that it always has

that's not a valid argument when we're talking about running out of atoms to work with

I'm with you. I'm a "mechanically sympathetic" anomaly amongst my age group and even many of my senior colleagues who came up in the 90s when Moore's Law == clock speed. My whining about cache thrashing and branch mispredictions might fall on deaf ears now, but I'll be ready to fix all the slow-ass code when people realize that silicon atoms aren't getting any smaller and heat isn't getting any less hot.

you have my approval :) I've been toying with the notion of continuing to focus on embedded C since most of the Computer Science d00ds I've worked with have no clue how things work "what? the runtime takes care of it" besides O-notation.

If we do hit process limits on process node limits, we'll start going massively parallel, it which case you still won't be using C to program your 10000 processor machine.