If silicon is, in the words of David M. Brooks, a Harvard University computer scientist, “the canvas we paint on,” engineers can do more than just shrink the canvas.

Silicon could also give way to exotic materials for making faster and smaller transistors and new kinds of memory storage as well as optical rather than electronic communications links, said Alex Lidow, a physicist who is chief executive of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation, a maker of special-purpose chips in El Segundo, Calif.

There are a number of breakthrough candidates, like quantum computing, which — if it became practical — could vastly speed processing time, and spintronics, which in the far future could move computing to atomic-scale components.

Recently, there has been optimism in a new manufacturing technique, known as extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, lithography. If it works, EUV, which provides light waves roughly a tenth the length of the shortest of the light waves that make up the visible spectrum, will permit even smaller wires and features, while at the same time simplifying the chip-making process.

But the technology still has not been proved in commercial production.

Earlier this year ASML, a Dutch stepper manufacturer partly owned by Intel, said it had received a large order for EUV steppers from a United States customer that most people in the industry believe to be Intel. That could mean Intel has a jump on the rest of the chip-making industry.

Intel executives, unlike major competitors such as Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, insist the company will be able to continue to make ever-cheaper chips for the foreseeable future. And they dispute the notion that the price of transistors has reached a plateau.

Yet while Intel remains confident that it can continue to resist the changing reality of the rest of the industry, it has not been able to entirely defy physics.