> And we are in the realm of tons of little tricks that improve density and performance - nothing really dramatic but there are still improvements here and ther

> And we are in the realm of tons of little tricks that improve density and performance - nothing really dramatic but there are still improvements here and there. I don't think that's fair. Density is still increasing fairly substantially. Just going off of TSMC's own numbers here: 16nm: 28 MTr/mm2 10nm: 52.5 MTr/mm2 7nm: 96.5 MTr/mm2 5nm: 173 MTr/mm2 Performance (read: clock speeds; but for transistors those are one & the same) are not really increasing, though, those have pretty much plateaued. And the density achieved in practice doesn't necessarily keep up, as the density numbers tend to be for the simplest layouts.