Will chips ever stop getting smaller?

It was suspected that computer chip development would have to slow down eventually, and when it happened people would finally be able to relax. Think of being able to just buy a processor and know that it would be the top of the line for the next five years. Sadly, this is still not the case.

Right when we thought this day was dawning, Silicon Valley announced the lithography imaging processes, according to Wired magazine, which could print circuits with 30-nanomenter ridges.

To put that in perspective, current chips are printed with 90-nanomenter ridges. This reduction in ridge size would be equivalent to the advances in the computer industry in the last two decades. This means that CPU’s would eventually reach speeds of 5-GHz. Estimates have also been made that the transistors found in CPU’s today would quadruple in the next four years (to 4 billion).

According to Wired, with this new breakthrough it’s expected we won’t see another slow down until 2020.

Where does that leave consumers? Will we always be scrambling to get the newest software? There will always be those who want to be on the cutting edge, but will normal people need a 5-GHz processor? Today a decent processor runs at just 1-GHz. Will computers change that much?

The computer industry has shown that it has the capacity to make hardware that blows everything we use today out of the water, and that’s dandy. The question though, is what kind of software can we expect consumers would actually need all those beefy chips and CPU’s for?

Somehow this question reminded me of the age-old mistaken question asked by IBM in the early ’80s: “What would the average person do with a computer?”

We can only wait and see what will come next.