Some designers think that power consumption rather than gate size will be the limiting factor in packing more transistors onto a CPU:
Ultimately, "power consumption will probably become the limiter...because as we put more and more transistors per unit area, if we don't keep the power density flat, we can't use the chip," said Bijan Davari, vice president of semiconductor development at IBM Microelectronics.Sure, chips could still be manufactured, Davari said, but they would be use too much power to be practical for use in home PCs or cellular phones.
