Over the years we have grown used to a 10-fold increase in computer hardware performance every 5 years. This exponential growth has been consistent with Moore's law. Around 2004 exponential performance growth at this staggering pace seemed to have reached a ceiling. The major reason for this was that further performance increases led to intolerable high levels of heat generation from the circuitry. A dominating challenge to future hardware designs is to limit the heat generation of the electronic circuitry while improving the overall computational performance. An important question is whether exponential performance growth can be expected also in the future, and at which pace. The paper contains a discussion of what parameters are important for the future development, and what can be expected in the future. The presentation is meant for a non-specialist audience.