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Lightwave comments on Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber - Less Wrong
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Think of any real-world problem that takes one day on modern hardware. When computers were 365 times slower (that is, 12 - 13 years ago), it would have taken one year to solve such problems.
Don't you think there is any real-world problem that would benefit from 365x faster hardware, even if you can interact with it only once a day?
(Even if individual tasks take less than one year to complete, you can pool several of them and run them serially on the 365x computer)
Doesn't circuit design (and therefore computer processor design) require fairly large computational resources (for mathematical modelling)? Thus faster hardware now can be used to create even faster hardware.. faster.
Yes, but how much of the work that goes into the next generation is just layout? It doesn't solve all of your chemical or quantum mechanical issues, or fixes your photomasks for the next shrunken generation, etc. If layout were a major factor, we should expect to hear of 'layout farms' or supercomputers or datacenters devoted devoted to the task. I, at least, haven't. (I'm sure Intel has a datacenter or two, but so do many >billion tech multinationals.)
And if layout is just a fraction of the effort like 10%, then Amdahl's law especially applies.
it doesn't give many actual current details, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_lithography implies that as of 2006 designing the photomask for a given chip required ~100 CPU years of processing, and presumably that has only gone up.
Etching a 22nm line with 193nm light is a hard problem, and a lot of the techniques used certainly appear to require huge amounts of processing. It's close to impossible to say how much of a bottle neck this particular step in the process is, but based on how much really knowing what is going on in even just simple mechanical design requires lots of simulation I would actually expect that every step in chip design has similar types of simulation requirements.
There is some positive feedback in circuit design (although sublinear, I think), but hardware serial speed is essentially limited by the size of the surface features on the IC, which is in turn limited by the manufacturing process and ultimately by the physical limits of CMOS technology.