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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Generally speaking, we do not see CPUs “40% faster” than the previous generation. Marketing teams are very smart and know how to fudge numbers and make things more impressive than they actually are.
Each generation is iteratively better than another. There are a couple reasons for this.
1. Semiconductors (what the CPU is made of) are not manufactured by Apple. Apple *designs* the microarchitecture for these chips, but does not manufacture them. Companies like TSMC and Samsung actually manufacture these chips. The holy grail of semiconductor manufacturing is making transistors on the chip smaller. Why? Because smaller transistors require less energy, and you can pack more of them in the same area on the chip. It’s a win-win. However, the process of making transistors smaller is very difficult and takes a long time to research and develop.
2. Business leaders do not want to ship every new feature possible with every new product. It’s much better to release iterative improvements year over year to lengthen sales and provide reasons to upgrade every generation. If Apple played their whole hand all at once, they would have WAY too much demand for the newest and greatest iPhone, and then no sales in the next year. A calculated approach is much more stable. Right now, Apple executives are planning out the next 5-10 years in advance.
How to manufacture them more cheaply. They always knew how to do it but make more by incremental releases. It’s all a big con.
It all comes down to money. It’s true some new technology is made pretty frequently. But they don’t release everything at once. Let’s say they have a patent for 2 new things, but they could sell just the one new thing and make more money, and then not have to come up with a new thing next year to make more money by selling the new thing they were sitting on because it wasn’t profitable yet to release it.
Calculations happen nearly at light speed. Your phone has to make millions or billions of them per second. Chips can only support so many calculations per second. Your phone going slow is basically a queue forming waiting in line to be calculated. Chips are getting better now that they can perform more calculations for less chip size. More calculations, less queue, less queue more speed.
I read this off an AMD article a while back but basically there’s several development teams working mostly independently of eachother to develop faster architecture down the road and the releases are leapfrogged to give each of them time. So technically there’s chip designs in the works for product that won’t be released for another 3-4 years. This is the only real way you can always get a consistently faster product year after year as you aren’t relying on miracle breakthroughs in technology.
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