ELI5: Moore's Law - Does computing power really double every 18 months? Will this ever plateau out?

Yup.

Memory is stored in a capacitor which is charged or discharged by wires that act as very small inductors. Transistors are also basically 3 capacitors back-to-back. The whole thing is coordinated by wires running in parallel which are to first order approximated as inductors

The impedance of an inductor is wL, where w is the frequency, which means that the faster the clock speed, the greater the resistance in the circuit, which means more power and heat, which means bigger wires etc so it doesn't melt. That puts a practical upper limit on cpu and memory frequency, which you may have noticed we hit a few years ago. Additional gains were made by making circuit components smaller and having more of them.

However, the smallest charge that can be stored on a capacitor is one electron, so you can only get so small. And as your capacitor gets smaller, its capacitance is lower and it'll leak more charge, which means your memory has to cycle faster to maintain charged, but due to inductance there's a practical upper limit on that speed. Also, impedance of a capacitor is 1/wC, so faster speed means capacitors are less resistive, but smaller capacitors are more resistive. So there's also a practical limit on how small you can go (we haven't reached it yet, but we're getting close).

There are still some improvements to be made, so there will still be some speed-up. We haven't reached the lower size limit yet, and greater efficiency in all areas means we can pump more power (and hence higher speeds). But significant improvements will require a quantum leap in technology (see what I did there?)

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread