My guess of what’s going on is that something like “serial progress” (maybe within the industry, maybe also tied with progress in the rest of the world) matters a lot and so the 1st order predictions with calendar time as x axis are often surprisingly good. There are effects in both directions fighting against the straight line (positive and negative feedback loops, some things getting harder over time, and some things getting easier over time), but they usually roughly cancel out unless they are very big.
In the case of semiconductors, one effect that could push progress up is that better semiconductors might help you build better semiconductors (e.g. the design process uses compute-heavy computer-assisted design if I understand correctly)?
My guess of what’s going on is that something like “serial progress” (maybe within the industry, maybe also tied with progress in the rest of the world) matters a lot and so the 1st order predictions with calendar time as x axis are often surprisingly good. There are effects in both directions fighting against the straight line (positive and negative feedback loops, some things getting harder over time, and some things getting easier over time), but they usually roughly cancel out unless they are very big.
In the case of semiconductors, one effect that could push progress up is that better semiconductors might help you build better semiconductors (e.g. the design process uses compute-heavy computer-assisted design if I understand correctly)?