Computers in the distant future?

FishmanGeertz

What will computers, especially personal computers be like in the year 2050-2100? With Moore's law quickly becoming obsolete, I wonder what will be done to dramatically increase the performance and computational power of microprocessors in the distant future.

Famous physicist Michio Kaku often speaks on TV about what technology might be like in the future. But I haven't seen any prominent scientists speak about what computer technology could be like in the second half of the 21st century.

40 years ago, the kinds of computers scientists and electronic engineers could only dream of would become household technology. I can't even imagine the kind of computers we'll have 40 50 years from now.

Will the future irrelevancy of Moore's law be an absolutely insurmountable barrier to drastically improving the performance of computers? Will there come a point where literally nothing can be done to make microprocessors faster?

Ryan_m_b

Off the top of my head after Moore's law finally tops out we could still improve computers with 3D chips, chemical, optical, nanomechanical or even quantum computing with better software to drastically improve performance.

Parallel computing over a cloud via a mesh network with 4G bandwidth levels could turn every computer into one huge distributed one, any task could quickly be performed by working with the idle power of other computers (with a limit imposed by how parallel a task can be and how much bandwidth is available).