If the computing industry carries on with it's current status quo then for at least the next 10 years the whole industry is going to be haemorrhaging money at a ridiculous rate not something the industry needs over such time as a lot of resources are going to be need to R&D their way past the problem of lithography scaling hitting a brick wall in terms of mass production of next gen tech at a marketable price. Yes in the Labs they can do wonderful things with 1 or a few atoms and are discovering quite a lot but to bring such things to market will take more time than the industry has before the lithography ceiling really bites painfully into profits.
What can be done to bring in the revenues required to cover this time period.
2 quite viable options are small SIGe die solutions like thermo optic pins and or new computing architecture like cellular neural network synaptic chips.
Thermo optic pins are not likely to be that commercially viable for a little while yet Neural network tech is already starting to enter the market AMD's Ryzen uses on chip neural networking to better schedule resources across the bus.
However in order for the computing industry to stay healthy during this period they are going to have to better market tech viable for mass production now and in the very near future.
One things for sure code right now is breaking with tradition and is actually getting more efficient also the design efficiency on the very latest motherboards and chips had markedly improved just this year this extra efficiency should give the industry some breathing space but perhaps not enough and the turnover may be lacking over the next ten years when simply improving efficiency without being able to really scale down any further with lithography. large die 7nm tech is not really profitable at all right now and Intel has stated it's finding the issue hard below 11nm. You can expect some major announcements about this issue from all the industry leaders over the next few years.
So what other options might there be that can bridge this gap and bring the industry at large enough turnover to properly progress.
Well it would probably be more efficient to have a mounting standard for customizable port layouts perhaps even with a State of the art industry offering fully customizable port plates and Thermal management options for a more internal pci bus set of slots to sister with different port plate options and to offer each compute unit a more dynamic range of options in terms of more application specific co processing. Extending the standards this way would enable to user to build far more purposeful units that perform well at given tasks say like for bitcoin mining, 3d rendering, video production custom main server units for home ect and in business a far higher level of customisation in server farms relative to the tasks people want to do on the cloud and enabling perhaps a wider dynamic for virtualized cloud extensible setups. Neural network scheduling in such server farms would be useful and to make high density sd memory cards more popular for consumer and industry products would enable better space/storage density ratios relative to price.
Another trick the industry could do would be to focus on doing more with fewer form factors as to shink the dynamic as to focus on widening whats possible for what form factors remain like say sticking with nano itx and Micro ATX as the focal platforms.
USB Port IO could also allow for a new era in the home and industry of plug sockets and such an IO may even be able to offer a good standard for mounting a charging shelf that works with data and electricity enabling devices that have no screen or buttons like for example a ball clock that you throw at the wall that you can put on the shelf and then change the settings and alarm sound of or an lcd writing pad with a scanner that is enabled when put on the shelf as to upload sketches which might even be in some sort of anodigital codec.
Sprousing the tech industries up in such ways and increasing the possibilities may just be whats required to make healthy enough turn overs in such a problematic climate as where the tech industry is heading and encouraging the consumer and industries to replace more stuff with more custom options might just get the tech industries along with other advances through it all.