Agree that, in the long run, we should expect a "breakthrough" that leads to a new direction. As you surmise, most likely, the "breakthrough" will be from a company that can "afford to make a breakthrough" -- and that's unlikely to be AMD.

Still, practically speaking, a genuine "circuit material or technology" breakthrough that improves normally priced consumer products may be two or more decades away.

Looking farther: At about the two or three decade mark (or maybe 5 decades), like many, I hypothesize the "singularity" (or something close enough). At that point, sentient (or virtually sentient) computer AI will begin to take over for all human thought and technical progress will be quicker. Hopefully, that will ultimately be good for humans -- but, I hypothesize it won't be at first and possibly never given the inherent nature of politicians -- whoops, wrong forum for Politics

Anyhow, I won't be here to see it -- darn