There will always be a hard limit, but one thing I could see us looking back on and finding weird is that we have a single layer of transistors. If we could build more complex 3D structures I'd expect we could see vast improvements.
Not part of Moore's Law but there are also
1. Significant storage improvements, and bringing the storage closer to the processing (or the other way around) which massively improves the overall speed.
2. Better chip design. Not knocking the current designers, but it'd be foolish to assume we have the theoretical optimum chip designs.
3. Cost. Sure, you're not going to improve every use case but what if my motherboard was just a big layer of cpus with non-volatile huge caches because it cost pennies? Particularly when we hit some larger limits, we'd be likely to see that current best design being produced by lots of people and getting cheaper and cheaper.
Along with 3. comes more custom designed chips. If we can get the cost of design and fabrication down, we can speed things up by having a bunch of chips for specific functions.
Not part of Moore's Law but there are also
1. Significant storage improvements, and bringing the storage closer to the processing (or the other way around) which massively improves the overall speed.
2. Better chip design. Not knocking the current designers, but it'd be foolish to assume we have the theoretical optimum chip designs.
3. Cost. Sure, you're not going to improve every use case but what if my motherboard was just a big layer of cpus with non-volatile huge caches because it cost pennies? Particularly when we hit some larger limits, we'd be likely to see that current best design being produced by lots of people and getting cheaper and cheaper.
Along with 3. comes more custom designed chips. If we can get the cost of design and fabrication down, we can speed things up by having a bunch of chips for specific functions.