Comment by gobdovan

> and the whole history of computing is about how faster chips is an excellent answer to difficult computational problems.

I don't really disagree, and I am definitely not taking their marketing pitch seriously. Yet, you could look at the same computation history and interpret it as an economically constrained hill-climbing around an idea that was simple enough to work reliably (von Neumann architecture) and that worked and scaled so well that we were rarely forced or desperate enough to move conceptually far away from it.

Sufficiently general digital computers can simulate other computational models, so I think 'faster' is ultimately the end game, but for some classes of computation, as you also noted, we may need to go for analog hardware, (maybe) quantum devices, optical interconnects, and so on.

Bret Victor has a talk about this, more or less: [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4