Eh? By all indications compute is now evolving SLOWER than ever. Moore's Law is dead, Dennard scaling is over, the latest fab nodes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

This isn't the 80s when compute doubled every 9 months, mostly on clock scaling.

Indeed, generational improvements are at an all time low. Most of the "revolutionary" AI and/or GPU improvements are less precision (fp32 -> fp16 -> fp8 -> fp4) or adding ever more fake pixels, fake frames, and now in the most recent iteration multiple fake frames per computed frame.

I believe Nvidia has some published numbers for the 5000 series that showed DLSS off performance, which allowed a fair comparison to the previous generation, on the order of 25%, then removed it.

Thankfully the 3rd party benchmarks that use the same settings on old and new hardware should be out soon.

Fab node size is not the only factor in performance. Physical limits were reached, and we're pulling back from the extremely small stuff for the time being. That is the evolutionary part.

Revolutionary developments are: multi-layer wafer bonding, chiplets (collections of interconnected wafers) and backside power delivery. We don't need the transistors to keep getting physically smaller, we need more of them, and at increased efficiency, and that's exactly what's happening.

All that comes with linear increases of heat, and exponential difficulty of heat dissipation (square-cube law).

There is still progress being made in hardware, but for most critical components it's looking far more logarithmic now as we're approaching the physical material limits.

Today I'm using 2x 3090's which are over 4 years old at this point and still very usable. To get 48gb vram I would need 3x 5070ti - still over $2k.

In 4 years, you'll be able to combine 2 of these to get 256gb unified memory. I expect that to have many uses and still be in a favorable form factor and price.