I think with the advent of quantum computers a limit in computing power is still far way. Nonetheless, what has brute computing power enabled us to do so far? There have been a few prestigious projects, ie. deep blue, seti, cern, molecular folding, etc. which take advantage of this power. But most research projects profit little from an increase in computing power. I think new software and algorithms play a bigger role in trying to enable machines to solve the more "human" tasks.
Increases in computing power affect the whole chain - you're looking at the high end, where the limit of computing power is pushed but you also need to remember that computing power for a given cost increases across the whole spectrum of computing devices.
My phone can listen to what I say, translate it into French, and speak it back to me, albeit leveraging external compute power to do most of the heavy lifting. But it wouldn't be possible to provide that external compute power at scale 20 years ago.
I'm also sure that countless small innovations in bioinformatics add up collectively to significant changes over time, and those individual innovations are powered by the more broadly available increases in computing power.
DNA sequencing, and everything we do with it, would be pretty painful without the computing power we have.
We've also gotten the ability to do much better fluid dynamics modeling, astrophysics simulations (whether you believe them or not), climate models (likewise). I've made use of the processing power we have now to do a bunch of "experimentation" in representation theory, though that's not obvious from the resulting writeup, which is more or less algebraic proof.
In general, for a lot of research areas where we think we have a decent model of some of the things that are going on more computing power means more ability to use a computer to look for things to actually try in the lab (and thus refine the model) as well as more ability to collect and handle data.
And then there's the mundane bits, like being able to find existing work more easily, being able to typeset and disseminate your papers more easily and so forth.
I wasn't aware quantum computers had actually been invented yet. They are still theoretical devices.
Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer capable of executing the quantum algorithms.
That aside, all I'm saying is that exponential growth has a limit. That growth could be measured in MIPS or in algorithm performance, it doesn't really matter, but I don't think that growth will continue exponentially.
