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.
Big part is they are making stuff smaller so it takes less energy and stuff is closer to each other. Chip manufacturing has been killing it for the last few decades, look up tsmc if your interested. The other part is just millions in research and development continuously. You can build a better mouse trap if your dumping endless amounts of money into it.
The elephant in the room is that the chips are throttled to reduce capacity from their actual capabilities, so the company can simulate regular innovation and motivate people to upgrade devicesmore often
If they sold a chip at full capacity the first year it was available, people would be less interested in upgrading their device until the a new chip was actually developed.
Differences between last year’s phone and this year’s phone are already usually miniscule, companies use this tactic and many others to make the devices seem more different than they actually are.
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True ELI5: every year we figure out how to make things cheaper, so now you can afford a faster phone for a similar price to the old one.
They don’t. Phone companies slowly slow your phone down to make the next iteration seem faster.
One other thing to consider is changes in how these are marketed.
When the iPhone was new the speed increases were compared to the prior years device and you got 40%-100% gains in speed.
In more recent years you still get a 40% increase but they changed the comparison devices, it’s the new device vs something older than last years device – perhaps a two year old phone.
These are often based on the “upgrade cycle” people have and so can be somewhat justified.
However the X% faster marketing needs to be read along with the small print to confirm that the comparison is valid.
It could be 40% faster compared to model 3 years ago, at a very specific configuration and workload.
Basiclly sell you a phone running 25% of its max power.. then they just increase the power a little every year..
Same with cpu, gpu’s etc.
Why?…. Money!
They are in the phone selling business. So they will not just pour everything they know into one device one year. That’s bad business.
Apple is all for making you part with your money to get something they say is “better”. Does it really matter? Not really.
Well, all companies are the same pretty much. But, apple is very slow in their steps each year. Everything to milk things as much as possible.
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