Like when apple releases a new iPhone and there’s a new A17 bionic chip, or whatever they’re on now, how is it 40% faster than the last one? What did they discover in 1 year to make it faster? Why didn’t they make these changes in the last one??
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Do they?
Transistor size is still shrinking, so they can put 20-30-40% more with each smaller transistor size. How can they use more transistors to make things faster?
1. Add more computing cores.
With graphic procesors that is a bit easier, because graphics calculations are inherently easy to parallelize and you can have many cores and use them effectively.
CPU cores are a bit different. Some tasks can’t be parallelized, so you have no use from more cores.
2. Make cores faster
It’s complex topic, but there are some “calculations” that you can do a lot faster if you make a dedicated hardware for it. For example you can take hundreds or thousands of clock cycles to multiply two numbers or you can make a part of the cpu that does only that one thing and can do it in several cycles.
You can make calculations for multiple things in advance, and depending on outcome of some calculation just use the one you need. That’s called speculative execution and is root of some security problems.
Cpu clock still does rise with smaller transistor size, so there is that.
3. You can add more cache memory
Cache is a really fast memory sitting near cpu cores. Instead of waiting for RAM to deliver information, you have it at hand.
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When phones are in question, power draw is a big factor. As transistors get smaller, they use less energy, so you can add more of whatever you were constrained by power usage before.
There are other ways, I’m sure people will write about them.
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