[astrodust]

"Coming to an end"? The sky isn't falling yet. Just because they're having some trouble with one process doesn't mean the whole party is over.

There are other materials to make chips out of besides silicon, gallium arsenide and carbon for instance, each of which has different scaling properties.

There's also ways to make chips more dense by stacking wafers instead of trying to shrink features.

[Symmetry]

It can sometimes be comforting to know that the universe imposes fundamental limits on how how efficiently computation can be done. Comforting because IIRC we've still got at least 15 orders of magnitude improvement available. But while I'm sure you're right that we're going to be able to switch to different materials (or maybe away from transistors entirely) when progress in silicon runs out we might have to expect an interregnum while other computational substrates are developed to the point where they can provide higher performance.

Stacking is certainly a thing and it's good for memory (see AMD's newest graphics card) but power dissipation provides limits in terms of how much high speed logic you can put under a given area.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9266/amd-hbm-deep-dive