We're all used to the ever increasing peformance of CPUs. Moving from 4MHz 6502s and Z80s to 300MHz Pentium IIs and 604s in under the last twenty years, the industry is showing no signs of slowing down.
But will it slow down? In some ways, you might expect this; computing is relatively new, the modern computer being around only about fifty years. It seems hard to believe that the 'doubling of performance every 18 months' can continue indefinately.
Indeed, recently scientists at the University of Florida said that ever faster CPUs will be over by 2010, just twelve years from now.
They have studied current processors, and say how the silicon chips cannot continue to shrink in size. The tranistors of the latest CPUs are only 50 atoms across, and when you get down to 10 atoms (which will be around 2010), things are too small to work.
Personally, I am more optimistic. People have always said how the end of the ever advancing CPU is just over a decade a way, why should things be different now? We must remember that in the future, new technologies may be discovered. It may be that today's method of producing microchips has limitations, but as far as computing in general goes, you cannot forsee breakthroughs that will allow faster computational power. The first 'computers' were machines made of cog wheels and handles. You could have predicted an end to the computer by saying there's a limit to how small cogs can get... Yeah, it's likely that the computer revolution will slow down in the future, but technology will still advance to give faster processors, even if it is at a not so rapid pace.
Interestingly, the end to the computer revolution could come due to economic cause, rather than technological ones. The factories to make new processors also increases in cost with time; by 2010, the cost to build the plant to make the latest processor will be equivalent to the entire GDP of a medium sized country, today. So the rate of faster CPUs appearing may slow down simply because there isn't the money to build them, as opposed to lacking the technology.
Mark