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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These improvements typically come from shrinking the size of the transistors that make up the CPU.
Every year or two, big chip manufacturers like TSMC release improved processes that can make chips with smaller and smaller transistors.
These tend to cone with improvements in 3 areas- Transistor density, clock speed, and power efficiency.
Smaller transistors means you can pack more of them in to a chip of the same size, which will increase computational power.
Higher clock speeds make the chip do more work per transistor per unit time, so the chip runs faster than an old one.
And higher power efficiency means that you can add more transistors than last year’s chip while keeping power draw the same.
There are usually other improvements being made in how the chip is designed, to make them even better at running the types of calculations they need to.
It’s not just apple, all the big chip designers are doing the same every 1-2 years. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and many others.
The numbers you’ll see in marketing are usually exaggerated based on highly specific scenarios, or they’ll advertise “40% faster (for the same power draw)”, but they actually run the chip slower to lower power draw and extend battery life, so the phone isn’t any faster, but is more power efficient.
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