I find myself agreeing with Jim Keller. His stance — from very high up in the chip design industry — is that individual teams at the bottom may be seeing the en

I find myself agreeing with Jim Keller. His stance — from very high up in the chip design industry — is that individual teams at the bottom may be seeing the end of the road, but there are alternate paths being explored by other teams. Often these alternate paths aren’t yet commercialised — mere options — but enable the overall improvements to keep going without getting stuck. Some examples: Stacking and joining chiplets will soon enable over 2 TB/s memory bandwidths for ordinary devices, far higher than the 50 GB/s typical of mid-tier DIMM memory. Storage latency and IOPS is still going up. Millions of random accesses per second with ~20 microsecond latencies enabled technologies like DirectX DirectStorage. This totally changes the way game engines work and how their art assets are authored. I could go on…