Is there a speed limit on computing

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A pair of physicists have shown that if processors continue to accelerate in accordance to Moore’s Law, we’ll hit the wall of faster processing in roughly 75 years.

The curtain will eventually come down for silicon in today’s manufacturing methods once engineers can no longer further shrink transistors and the copper wires that connect them. Processor fabrication using new technologies such as imprint lithography, graphene, and quantum computing will continue to yield faster and smaller chips. Nonetheless, those advanced techniques only stave off the absolute ceiling for speed, no matter how small the components get, according to physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts. As Inside Science reports, the two have slapped a speed limit on computing.

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