In this article, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer bashes Intel over the way it is making its chips faster these days:

Intel rubbish at making chips, says Ballmer

His basic complain contains a grain of truth:

“Intel is running to the limit of physics in chip design”, said the EmBallmer, “They can still double the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months but they can’t use the traditional transistors to make the chips run faster.”

In other words, the number of transistors is still increasing, but not the clock rate. It used to be that both increased. Also:

Instead of giving us faster processors, Ballmer says Intel is giving us more processors (his emphasis). He speaks here of Intel’s “many cores” – however he obviously doesn’t like this idea either

This is true, but misses the point that there is a lot that you can do with many cores.

Anyway, it raises the question: what are the next innovations that are going to occur to make chips better/stronger/faster? Here is one option:

New nanoscale process will help computers run faster and more efficiently

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have made a major contribution to this field by designing a new nanotechnology that will ultimately help make computers smaller, faster, and more efficient…

This technique could help reduce transitor sizes down to “between five and 20 nanometers.”

Another technique might be to completely re-engineer how we think about microprocessors, as explained here:

According to the video description:

Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain — to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.