[wibble10]

How will reaching the end of Moore’s law cause a crash like this?

Do you mean that future requirements will outstrip capacity? I don’t think this has been true for some time, we run a lot more systems and tend to scale horizontally; doubling compute power every n period isn’t a hard requirement imo.

[imtringued]

If we ever have an industrial revolution or massive productivity gains again it will most likely involve autonomous machines for things like farming, construction, delivery, transport, etc. All of these things depend on increases in power efficiency or performance. It is possible that we are one or two "doublings" away from achieving this in a mobile package and then suddenly moore's law stops.

For example Tesla is betting on conventional cameras and tries to overcome their shortcomings with computationally intensive machine vision. Tesla's custom chips allows them to have more processing power which means they can install more high resolution cameras and other sensors.

[ghaff]

Without higher throughput systems including but not limited to CPUs, you can to some degree just throw more servers at the problem. But now you’ve doubled (maybe more like tripled) the cost to get 2x the performance. And some applications like mobile and sensors depend on miniaturization for a given capability.