Is the era of general purpose computing over?

But the computational economics enabled by Moore’s Law is now changing. In recent years, shrinking transistors has become much more expensive as the physical limitations of the underlying semiconductor material begins to assert itself. The authors point out that in the past 25 years, the cost to build a leading edge fab has risen 11 percent per year. In 2017, the Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that it costs about $7 billion to construct a new fab. Not only does that drive up the fixed costs for chipmakers, it has reduced the number semiconductor manufacturers from 25, in 2002, to just four today: Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung and GlobalFoundries.