I wonder how significant it is that there is all this worldwide expansion of chip making factories just as we get to 3nm architectures, I say that because there aren’t very many nm’s left, what happens when we get to zero?
I wonder if the end of chip performance improvements could cause a short term boost in manufacturing investment and sales. Instead of chip investments in products and data centers surely becoming obsolete in a few years, useable lifetimes could be measured in decades if the chip designs and performance are not expected to change. If you can get 30 years out of a data center investment instead of 5, you can spend a lot more money and amortized it for longer.
It’s certainly interesting to think about. We’ve been accelerating these chip improvements at exponential rates for a lot of years, and essentially just as we hit the highest speed ever, and highest dependence, we are going to hit a brick wall of sorts. There’s going to be a massive spill over somewhere. Unless there’s some new fancy hardware invention, then the next thing to happen will be a software optimisation mania.