Scientists have predicted that unless radical improvements are made in the way we design computers, by 2040, computer chips will need more electricity than what our global energy production can deliver.
The projection could mean that our ability to keep pace with Moore's Law, the idea that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years is about to slide out of our grasp.
The prediction about computer chips outpacing electricity demand was originally contained in a report released late last year by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).
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The basic idea is that as computer chips become ever more powerful thanks to their greater transistor counts, they will need to suck more power in order to function, unless efficiency improves.
SIA calculates that, at the rate things are going using today's approaches to chip engineering, computing will not be sustainable by 2040, when the energy required for computing will exceed the estimated world's energy production.
Semiconductor manufacturers can counter this power draw by clever engineering, but the SIA says there is a limit to how far this goes in current methods.
These days, chip engineers stack ever-smaller transistors in three dimensions in order to improve performance and keep pace with Moore's Law, but the SIA says that approach won't work forever, given how much energy will be lost in future, progressively denser chips.
Will other alternative sources of energy or future technologies become available to help counter this problem?
Sources:
sciencealert.com
dailymail.co.uk
