content: The issue isn't that they can't make bigger chips, it's that they can't keep fitting more and more transistors into the same area. The cost of integrated circuits is generally per-area (more or less) instead of per-transistor which means the cost per transistor is going to stay pretty similar to what it is now (or even what it was a few years ago). This is why all the buzz in the last few years has been about more cores, GPU processing etc. instead of pumping up clock speeds and single-core performance. They can definitely work on optimizing existing CPU designs to get more performance out of the same area of transistor, or they can just make things more and more parallel (again, GPUs are great for this because they're basically a giant grid of small cheap CPUs hooked up together). There's still a huge amount of progress to be made even if we can't keep shrinking things, but the time of "everything automatically doubles in computing power every two years" is over.