I have to wonder if some of that growth was related to Moore's Law? Namely, the number of transistors grew and the use of them grew linearly with them in a sort of 'if you build it, they will come' fashion?
Now, as I understand it, growth has slowed outside of the labs and Moore's Law appears to no longer be valid. So, there will likely still be growth, but the growth will be more rare, difficult, and expensive?
Like your VR example, we've often had great predictions of the future and so very few of them actually pan out as expected.
CMOS scaling is close to dead and that’s been a very special tech and tech enabler. It’s not the only way to continue ramping performance and function. See GPUs for example. But it’s hard to replace that kind of tech.
Because the pitch on wires hasn’t decreased nearly as fast as effective feature size, there’s a strong bottleneck effect that limits single-socket devices in terms of their usable compute power. A good rule of thumb since ~2012, and for at least the next 5 years would be ~12 tera-single-channel ops/sec.
Now, as I understand it, growth has slowed outside of the labs and Moore's Law appears to no longer be valid. So, there will likely still be growth, but the growth will be more rare, difficult, and expensive?
Like your VR example, we've often had great predictions of the future and so very few of them actually pan out as expected.
I don't know, it's just a thought I've pondered.