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Comment by tedsanders | Hacker News Reader

It's always been economics. EUV already works. E-beam lithography already works. Carbon nanotube transistors already work. III-V transistors already work. It's just that none of these technologies work as cheaply as double patterned silicon.

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The fact the we can't manufacture transistors cheaper doesn't mean we won't see big jumps in compute value.We could seem improvements from fpga's(500x max),approximate computing(100x-1000x), packaging(3x-10x) or the radical option of analog computing(6-9 orders of magnitude for brain simulation etc).

Also, there's still huge amount of value to unlock from software, interfaces and the rest.Just look at the iphone where most of the value comes from a great touch interface and an app store. Moore's law is just a bonus.

500x performance improvement from using fpgas? Where do you get this number?

Asics can max out at about 1000x , and zvi orbach has a recent column talking about how to make an fpga with 50% efficiency of asic.

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021

I must have misunderstood, I thought you were saying FPGA's will surpass CPU's 500-fold.

And it will be economics that breaks through the cost challenges. If you can do something that nobody else can, it's a nice spot to be, you can even license out the actual implementation.

There are companies like IBM that take a more holistic approach to R&D. I'd expect someone like them to prevail in adaptation of new techniques or even paradigm shift.

Could these eventually be as cheap as double patterned silicon?

Yes, potentially. There are strong research efforts underway for all of them.

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