Perhaps if we truly run out of steam on the process node front?

Even if that happened tomorrow, I suspect we'd have _at least_ a decade of people tweaking/optimizing designs on the same node to squeeze meaningful performance upgrades out. Eg, coming up with hardware support for new int/float formats that make more sense for the models of 2029, running matrix operators on ram chips directly, etc.

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runako 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember back in the early 2000s when people thought we were running out of steam on the advancements front. This was roughly around the time when CPU clocks stopped getting faster. Pentium hit 3GHz in 2005, Intel Core Ultra 5 performance cores are generally around this exact speed 20 years later.

Since at least the 640kb quip, betting against progress or the appetite for progress has been a losing bet.

	▲	jmalicki 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly post 2005 things did slow down dramatically for typical single core workloads. In the late 90s and early 2000s the mantra was "why waste time optimizing your software? By the time you're done the next gen of CPUs will have made up the difference." Now the increase is more about moving to GPUs and power efficiency etc. We still have increases, but the rate of speedup has slowed down a lot.