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??
In: 513
Short answer: There are processor manufacturing companies constantly coming up with better technological processes, and processor design companies coming up with better designs. A lot of really smart people oversee the whole process.
Processors in very simplified form are just a bunch of transistor logic gates, wired together to be able to do specific instructions. A lot of the improvements over the last 50 years is due to reducing the size of each individual transistor gate. [Here’s more about the process node.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication) By making the gates smaller you can fit in more of them into smaller space and the energy required to operate each gate is reduced, making faster processors.
We are nearing the limits of what’s physically possible to manufacture, because of two things:
1. logic gates become small enough that quantum effects become a meaningful force, resulting in errors in logic gate operations.
2. logic gates become small enough that they’re made from only a couple dozen silicon atoms. We don’t know what’s the minimum amount of atoms we can make one logic gate out of.
It is estimated that we will not be able to achieve technology node lower than 1nm (we’re currently at 3nm for newest Apple silicon). However, we will then try to improve computational capacity elsewhere – for example by adapting different, faster instruction sets, or by improving memory caching / other possible optimizations.
Latest Answers