I thought we were talking about silicon, not current computers ? We are scaling into 3 dimensions: just look at 3D memory and 3D FPGAs. The main reason why gen

I thought we were talking about silicon, not current computers ? We are scaling into 3 dimensions: just look at 3D memory and 3D FPGAs. The main reason why general processors are not 3D is precisely because limits of lithography has not been reached yet. It's been cheaper to shrink the existing process than to develop solutions to problems such as heat dissipation or complexity of 3D IC design. But we don't even need to stick with silicon. There are other promising building blocks: memristors, graphene, spintronics, optronics, etc. GaAs if nothing else. Radically different computing architectures are being proposed all the time. Quantum computers offer intriguing possibilities. The reason we are still using von Neumann design is that it works well for the current applications, and again, it's been cheaper to improve it than to switch to something new. Computers we have today absolutely SMOKE computers we had 50 yeas ago. I'll be surprised if we have any less advancement in the next 50.