How does electronic technology so reliably get better every single year? How is there always new products with seemingly no cap to ability to develop them? (Thinking video game consoles, GPUs, CPUs, etc.)

Question

I don’t really understand how it’s realistic that every single year new GPUs, CPUs, consoles, TVs, etc. are being released with new technological advances. How is there not a year where it’s like “welp, actually our tech right now is advanced as we can figure it out”. Do they hold onto some features to save them for future releases?

In: 1

Answer 1

That’s called “Moore’s Law”. Every few years we are able to double the number of transistors on the same size of chip. More transistors mean more calculations running at the same time, and also smaller transistors work faster.

How do we do that? Well, it’s a lot of effort, but we research new technology that allows building even smaller circuits. For the past decades this has been true, but some people think we are about to reach the limit.

The limit people fear is wavelength related. We now make structures so small that regular light can’t resolve them anymore. That’s bad because we use light to create those tiny structures. There are some possible workarounds, Moore’s Law might slow down though.

That’s calculation power increasing exponentially, wich allows more complex software to run in adequate time. New features are developed independant of that, and those are basically a race between companies. If you have something new first that brings in a ton of money, so they constantly try to top each other.