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Asked by anon-267455 on 5 Nov 2020.
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Zsolt Keszthelyi answered on 5 Nov 2020:
Absolutely. There is an interesting trend seen of how fast computers can keep getting faster, it is called “Moore’s law”.
Recently, the most promising path (to speed up computers) may be what is called quantum computing. Of course, there could be different ways too.
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Sam Geen answered on 5 Nov 2020:
There is a problem where we are reaching what we can do with silicon chips – chips are getting so small that circuits are getting close to several atoms wide. There are some ways around this – we can simply use a lot of chips to solve one problem – I use hundreds of computers at once to make stars – but like Zsolt says, new ways of making chips are possible to make computers faster.
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Julian Onions answered on 5 Nov 2020:
Computers sort of can, but it is getting more and more difficult.
We can’t make them run much faster (the clock speed) as we are about at the limit of what can be done with the current speeds.
We can put more things on a chip, which means you can have several processors on a chip, and so you can have 8 or 16 processors running – which helps if what you are trying to do can be done in parallel.
However even then we are getting so some of the circuits on the chip are just a few atoms wide now, and so we are getting close to how small we can make them.
The other thing is power – the biggest computers in the world use enormous amounts of power – a good fraction of a power station. So going much beyond the million processor machines we use for specialised simulations is hard.
That said, people have been saying we are at the limit for years, and engineers find a way around it. This time though, the limits are pretty hard to work around! -
Adrien Chauvet answered on 5 Nov 2020:
Possibly (although there are physical limits to the miniaturisation of chips and their speed), but the goal is to go toward “quantum computing”, which is quite different compared to our usual CPU.
If we can achieve “quantum computing”, our computational power (the number of operation it can do) will simply explode and open whole new avenues for science, research and applications… hopefully for the good of society.
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Daisy Shearer answered on 5 Nov 2020: last edited 5 Nov 2020 3:38 pm
This is a problem we’re regularly thinking about in the field of quantum technology! We’ve reached the stage now with conventional computing where the size of transistors is of the order of the size of atoms. At this size, weird quantum mechanical effects like quantum tunnelling become more of an issue, causing problems like huge amounts of ‘leakage current’. Usually, the way we speed up computers is to add more transistors to computer chips, but we are reaching the limit of miniaturisation of computer chips. As the others say, quantum computing is one way that we are trying to overcome this. Rather than being limited by quantum mechanics, we’re trying to use quantum mechanics to our advantage to make a different kind of computer which uses more than just electric charge to operate, which would greatly speed up processing.
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Juan Pereiro Viterbo answered on 5 Nov 2020:
They can. They will. It is just a matter of deciding how we will do it, but it will definitely happen. We keep on making smaller electronics, we are starting to work with electronics using light (photonics), quantum computers are coming…
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