Is there a limit to how powerful computers will become?

Answer 1

Yes.
It is limited by the speed of electrons within the wires.
So if they used a superconductor with virtually no resistance at all, it would be limited by the speed of light.

Answer 2

Yes. Intel knew the limits 10 years back. The smallest dopping layer defines that limit and its equal to the size of the electron. Intel had this known for 10 years, but it wanted the people to use the technology for 10-20 years so it kept releasing more speedier computers with a gap of 1 year so that the wallets can keep spending money on the upgrades. We will soon see the end of it in the next 5 years. After that the computers will start becoming bigger again!!

Answer 3

All the way back in 1936, the mathematician Alan Turing proved that there are limits to what can be computed with a computer - not "you can't make it go faster", or "you can't add more memory", but deep fundamental limits - things that simply *cannot* be dome on a computer, no matter *how* powerful it is. This came to be known as the Turing Halting Problem (mostly because he proposed the Halting Problem, and then showed that a lot of other problems were essentially identical).

Answer 4

Yes, there is. Electrons can't move any faster than the speed of light, and chip sizes can't shrink beyond a limit, as there's a risk of electronic breakdown (sort of like lightening at low voltage, if the gap between two conductors is very small). So, using the present semiconductor technology, we cannot go much higher than 3-4GHz.

Scientists are working on using optical circuits (using the light itself as the carrier). If those experiments are successful, we might see computers much faster than today's.

Answer 5

Yes, theoretically there is a limit.

Technically we are reaching the end of the errors found in chips that can be fixed to make them faster. There is need for new technology to get much beyond the speed we are at now

Answer 6

Yes there is. My teacher of algorithmic once told us that the "physical barrier" becomes more and more obvious. The now days processors cannot evolve. You need to change the whole architecture, you need to obtain better materials (not discovered yet) to optimize the speed.

Still I've heard rumors about neural processors (that primitively emulates a brain) and that are more powerful than today's Pentium or Athlon.

Answer 7

Sometime five to 10 years from now, your PC's processor likely will run at 20GHz and its hard disk will hold 20 terabytes of data. But beyond being faster and bigger, the PC probably won't be that profoundly different.

Answer 8

no I do not think so for the next 20 to 40 years to come
who knows if it could become organitically gron or part of it like the memory but that is still fiction and may be forever but who knows for sure in time

Answer 9

If you build a powerfull quantum computer , and put on it more and more components , to use parallelism , nothing would stop you . ...except maybe that eventually you would use up all the matter and energy in the universe to build your computer , and you can't make it more powerfull than that .

Answer 10

thers a computer in japan who has no limts