> The reality is that each point on that curve is the result of team of very smart people making a breakthrough. My view is not meant to disparage the work of

> The reality is that each point on that curve is the result of team of very smart people making a breakthrough. My view is not meant to disparage the work of the people who keep the progress going. My point is that at some point Moore's "Law" has to breakdown since nothing real can double forever but perhaps you don't find philosophical/metaphysical arguments compelling. As way of analogy, look at electric power generation based on a heat engine cycle. Ultimately you run into theoretical limits based on the Second Law of thermodynamics. On top of these physical constraints are Economic Law such as marginal utility which determine if it is really economically efficient to spend x dollars to gain y increase in efficiency or to stop short of the theoretical limit due to diminishing returns on investment in efficiency gains. These are real laws that computer chips will eventually run into. My understanding of computer chips is that they are running into thermal limits and also bumping into quantum tunneling effects that are interfering with the deterministic nature of logic gates. I am sure people are working on ways around these limits and they may very well may find new and brilliant ways to continue the increase in processing power. It may even be true that theoretical limits to computation are far far away from where we are now and Moore's "Law" will continue to apply for decades but it still would not make it a actual physical law in the proper sense of the term.