But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.

Yes, I really believe that. And the reason why is probably not going to be very popular here but I believe that we took a wrong turn at some point in the past two or three decades that made us concentrate on the wrong thing. In the mid 80's there was a fairly strong push to substantially improve the quality of software, rather than the quantity. And when the web happened that all got flushed down the toilet and we now have about 500 ways to do the exact same thing, none of them very good, efficient or stable.

It's like the world just after the Cambrian explosion. Lots of room for expansion but no real plan or intelligence behind it resulting in a ton of repeat work and variations on themes that will ultimately go nowhere.

And once all that noise has died down the real work can finally begin, much more wood behind far fewer arrows.

I actually hope you're right. As you (approximately) wrote in another comment, "you canna change the laws of physics." CMOS has been a very special technology but it's obviously reaching the end of its life.

There are some exotic processes that give better performance but the economies of scale aren't there yet and the cost of production is probably always going to be much higher than that of Silicon, which is after all a very abundant element on Earth.

There was a fantastic video about IC manufacturing linked here on HN a while ago, I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it.

edit: Hah, found it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4