I'm talking as major as it was to switch from CPU to GPU. Will there realistically be any such advance before we mine out all the BTC?
There are a number of things that may cause a large advance, not sure if it will be as major as CPU to GPU but maybe.
* Webpage based miners, there is even one based on webCL. Individually they may not be that powerful but if a large website gave the option of not seeing ads or some other premium in return for mining then it could really add up.
* ASICs (but that has been pretty well covered)
* SHA specific instructions. New Intel cpus have support for AES and can do one round of it per clock cycle. If similar support were added for SHA-256 you could see some dramatic speedups.
* Lower power parts. Raw speed is only half the equation, power usage is also important. AMD released a cpu/gpu combo that has 400 stream processors and 4 cpu cores all with a 35 watt TDP. If this same process were used on graphics cards you would see a significant reduction in power usage which would allow significantly more stream processors on the graphics card.
* openCL compute cards. AMD and NVidia have both been pushing the compute aspect of their graphics cards, bitcoin is just one of many applications. If they came out with compute cards which had lots of stream processors, no support for video (no silicon for it, no connectors, less memory and lower clocked memory) it would have lower power requirements and better airflow.