This graph pretty much summarizes the "law" that's been behind the continuous growth the microchip industry has been enjoying for the last 40 years: every two years, you get to place twice as much transistors on the same integrated circuit. Actually, that would be an IC that costs the same to produce, which ends up being more or less the same.

At IDF, Gordon Moore himself reiterated that "we have another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental", namely the size of an atom. That wall will stop, from a personal computer perspective, not only the power race in the CPU field, but also the increase in RAM capacity. Magnetic storage capacity has problems of it's own, like paramagnetism. All in all, it looks like we are in for a ride that has a finish line. When we reach that point, something different will substitute current computers as we know them. Quantum compuetrs, neural nets? We'll get back to that before the 20's for sure.

Link: Daily Tech. 

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