Comment by fwlr

Few things have been tortured more than “Moore’s Law”, which originally meant an empirical observation that number of transistors on a single integrated chip of fixed size seemed to double every two years, but was broadly understood to mean “computation doubles every two years”, and as we found other ways to increase computation besides making smaller transistors we tended to gather those ways under the Moore’s law umbrella as well. Referencing Moore’s Law very rarely adds clarity, in my opinion. The cpu nanometer race is also similarly tortured: 3 nanometers might be close to the physical limit of semiconductor computation but that doesn’t mean anything, since “3nm” means 7 nanometer precision and a half-pitch length of ~14 nanometers. https://twitter.com/davidad/status/1661595361939533827

But enough nitpicking; the actual answer to your question is that those are about physical limits of our current hardware implementation of computation. The theoretical physical limits of computation that the author is thinking of are bounded by things like Margolus-Levitin’s limit of 6x10^33 operations per second per joule (I had to look up the SI prefix; it’s several thousand quettaflops). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margolus%E2%80%93Levitin_the...