I'm curious just how true it is that Moore's law is starting to approach physical limitations. I just recently listened to some of Feynman's speeches collected in [1]. One of them was about how to place all of the works of an encyclopedia onto the tip of a pin.

Did it cover anything we couldn't do today? No. But that was the point. Just using a somewhat naive view of the physical matter that you would be putting something on, it was possible to go quite dense. Imagine if we started going even denser.

Do I suspect we are approaching limits? Certainly. Question is more of just how much further we can go. And will we need a dramatic shift of any sort before we could realize some extra distance?

[1] https://www.audible.com/pd/Science-Technology/The-Pleasure-o...

>I'm curious just how true it is that Moore's law is starting to approach physical limitations.

Well, Moore's "Law" in the narrow sense has been, to a large degree, about CMOS process scaling and that's clearly running into physical limits.

There are other levers to get better economical performance--some of which come at the cost of extra work in software. For certain workloads, GPUs and TPUs have been an important work around. There almost certainly are further optimizations involving stacking and interconnects. Probably other application-tailored designs (which then have to have software tailored for them individually).

But CMOS scaling has been such a powerful lever that there's legitimate concern that it may not be possible to replicate that kind of advance using other techniques.

Fair. In the original context, it is clear they were on CMOS, and yes we do seem to be nearing these limits quite quickly.

I'm curious if/when we could/should move off of current CMOS techniques.