Bill Borre wrote on Mar 25, 2023, 12:37:
Genuine question: Is Moore's Law as dead as he is, or is that too soon?

Yes and at the same time also no. It's complicated.

We think of transistors in terms of silicon because, for a very long time, that has been the majority of their physical makeup (we'll skip MOSFETs for the time being). There have been some germanium transistors as well but they leak worse than silicon so they're not widely used.

The problem is that the more we reduce the size of silicon, the greater the chance of current leakage and field array interference as we pack more and more of them in to smaller and smaller dies.

This is where the "yes...but also no" part comes in. We're reaching, or have reached, the physical limits of what we can do with silicon. However, we have not reached the limits of what we can do with transistors since they're actually really simple devices. To continue "shrinking" die sizes, we need to spend exorbitant sums in material science to devise a viable replacement for silicon that doesn't have the same leakage and interference problems inherent in silicon at smaller yet more dense scale.

So, in summation, we are very near to hitting the wall with silicon but transistors are far from being replaced.

/-=-\

Quantum computing is a lot like cold fusion and low inertia, high thrust drives. We keep hearing about it. We sometimes see lab "examples" but no one is remotely close to putting in to a production ready state that behaves in predictable manner. With current technology, it may very well be improbable to put quantum computing in a predicative, production ready state. That doesn't even include that whole new languages will need to be created, revised, and tested to meet the capabilities of computing at that level and be understood and interfaced with by humanity in a human readable form.

I'm with Tact. I'm not ever going to see it in my lifetime. If I had children, I wouldn't expect to see it in their lifetime, either. We're still using nearly 100 year old technology as "current" technology, today. See above in regards to transistors.