opio :
The point is is that everything is getting smaller, and contrary to what vtarmiricmi says Moore's Law has not stagnated. It has slowed down sure, and companies like Intel and IBM have stated that they can get the lithography on their CPU's down to around 7nm-5nm before quantum tunneling becomes a problem, but technology will find a way.
Technological Singularity FTW!
Yes it is. So called Moore's Law (it actually isn't physics law, moreover it isn't
any law) puts number of transistors and time into relationship. There are no more doubling of the CPUs number of transistors every two years. 1st gen. i7 quad (2010) had cca. 750 mil. of them,
6th gen Skylake i7 quad (2015) has cca. double of that. Even Intel's best CPU to date, 10core i7-6950x has a 3,4 bil. of transistors.
According to Moore's Law, starting from 750 mil. transistors in i7 2010., 6th gen Skylake should have
48 bil.
Even if we neglect Intel's own generations of CPUs and take in the equation only number of years (what states ML), 2010 750 mil., 2012. 1,5 bil., 2014. 3 bil., 2016 6 bil.
So what we can conclude here:
1. Moore's Law is not valid anymore,
2. Intel's so-called CPU generations are actually not generations because their gradual performance (=number of transistors) is very low (around 10% in each 'generation'), which says itself that CPU development has stalled, explaining that the term 'generations' is market-term only.
Now I am not into conspiracy theories at all, but somehow I think that Intel back in the 2010 could produce CPU that could have had a 50% performance advancement, that is, to go from the core2quad to the ivy bridge cpus, and from that to go to the skylake-like cpu. That mean they could actually have had a 2010 ivy-bridge performance level, and for instance, 2014, skylake performance line. Instead 2
real generations (by 'real' I mean, significant CPU performance advancement), they had 6 'generations'. I think that is bad, even from the marketing point-of-view, because customers are not stupid; they realize that new CPU generation does not bring revolutionary advance (even not
evolutionary), and are skipping and postponing upgrade (from 1,2 to 5,6 gen for instance).
Completely another story is that even if the Moore's Law is right, that would not bring advancement into the whole PC industry, because software is not following. 20 years ago, I've thought that in the 2020, we would have have 'real' and functioning AI, that the voice recognition systems would be usual thing in the OSs, followed with the virtual reality and other stuff. But that is not happening, or very very slowly. So those issues cannot be solved with the 100-core CPU.