I read this on the weekend. Completely forgot to post it. Some very interesting comments within. For those new to the discussion, its especially an eye opener.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/technology/smaller-faster-cheaper-over-the-future-of-computer-chips.html?_r=0

.............The masks are used to expose hundreds of exact copies of each chip, which are in turn laid out on polished wafers of silicon about a foot in diameter.......

..........Machines called steppers, which currently cost about $50 million each, move the mask across the wafer, repeatedly exposing each circuit pattern to the surface of the wafer, alternately depositing and etching away metal and semiconducting components.......

............Silicon could also give way to exotic materials for making faster and smaller transistors and new kinds of memory storage as well as optical rather than electronic communications links, said Alex Lidow, a physicist who is chief executive of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation, a maker of special-purpose chips in El Segundo, Calif........

.................Intel executives, unlike major competitors such as Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, insist the company will be able to continue to make ever-cheaper chips for the foreseeable future. And they dispute the notion that the price of transistors has reached a plateau.............

......Yet while Intel remains confident that it can continue to resist the changing reality of the rest of the industry, it has not been able to entirely defy physics........

..............Ultra-low-power computer chips that will begin to appear at the end of this decade will in some cases not even require batteries — they will be powered by solar energy, vibration, radio waves or even sweat. Many of them will be sophisticated new kinds of sensors, wirelessly woven into centralized computing systems in the computing cloud......