As far as shrinking transistors further, isn't 7nm the physical limit?

Edit: I'm mistaken. Transistors as small as 1nm have been developed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos

Computing things still get cheaper as more tech gets included. For example, Someone working in AI or video games can drop a $1000 on a Cuda enabled GPU and get more than a 10x more performance increase then they could reasonably get with that $1000 3 years earlier. This is much more than the two doublings some interpretations of Moore's law predicts.

Not all performance increases are going to be inside the most complex part.

- the R&D and the fabs would probably cost a zillion dollars, in a shrinking market for high-performance CPUs

- yields would probably be very low, even as the process matured - this problem is becoming more and more pronounced with the latest generations

- the advantages over the current chips would not be great; note svantana's comment about diminishing returns with the most recent process shrink

It is??

There's still plenty of people who want more speed badly enough to pay for it, but my impression is that there aren't as many as there used to be.

The hyperscale folks care about how much physical space given performance takes, but that's likely more energy/performance than chipcount/performance constrained.

Upgraded to an i7-4790K almost 2 years ago, and while not willing to drop another $1500 to upgrade to the latest CPU/MB, I have been keeping an eye open.

7 companies provide Intel with 36% of its profit...

Source: http://fortune.com/2015/11/15/intel-super-7/

And that's not even dealing with the demon of quantum tunneling which IMO will likely kill node shrinks even harder.

Finally, the other comment is right, Dennard scaling is dead, and thermals have become the primary constraint in chip design. FinFETs have somewhat helped with this, but it's not enough.

in the presence of competition the Broadwell chip would have double the number of cores of the Haswell chip it was replacing, and thus the modern multithreaded benchmarks would have shown double the performance. Current situation clearly showcases what happens when there is no competition (the experience very familiar to anybody who saw/rode/drove a USSR/Russian made car or aware of the Russian presidential elections history of the last 17 years :)

At that size, defects of just a couple silicon atoms (approximately 0.2nm diameter) starts to become an issue. Photo lithography requires higher frequencies of "light" for smaller features, which also becomes more of a pain to deal with.

And that doesn't even get into the quantum effects at that scale, which is whole 'nother barrel of headaches.

I'm still surprised at the (seemingly to me) lack of research in molecular nanotechnology. We're rapidly approaching the point where we do need to precisely control the placement of each individual atom for these products.

You'd think the boards of directors and major investors would be pushing these companies harder to develop the next generation technologies. Though Wall Street itself barely cares about the next three months.