Why does hardware (phones, GPU’s, Processors) only get a little bit better annually, while never making any solid leaps ahead of competition?
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Cause they often don’t have enough time to research, develop and test new features. This takes years, but companies prefer to sell a new product every year because for some reason it results in more money.
Because moore’s law reached its limit and we can no longer increase capacity by simply reducing the transistor size because we got to a point where we ran into weird quantum mechanics effects.
Now we have to actually redesign the way things work to find places for optimisation, but that often makes things prohibitively expensive so improvements that actually make it into publicly available products are few and far between.
Back in the Pentium days, you’d release a Pentium III with a 1GHz clock instead of the previous 500MHz clock and you’d get a 100% improvement in speed across the board, no matter what.
Now that we reached the 3-4GHz barrier we instead add more cores, more cache, dedicated chips for certain tasks and whatnot and not only the gains are not as significant to begin with, only applications specifically designed to take advantage of those changes are afected. Worst case scenario, applications that do not take these changes into consideration actually perform WORSE.
Technology leaps when something new is made commercially viable either through crossing a threshold of progress or implementing something new.
For example when we had miniaturized components enough for smart phones to be a useful tool for the average person.
Since then because of the frequency of release each device seems minor in comparison but if you were to compare say a stock iPhone 8 with a current model you would see a lot of differences.
Apple’s M1 is quite a leap ahead the competition. Nothing comes even close to it’s performance for a similar TDP.
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I take it you’re too young to remember the release of the first iPhone? That was a revolutionary shift from non-smart phones and physical key, small screen smart phones like Blackberries. That was a huge leap in terms of phones and in terms of what consumers expected phones to be able to do.
People are rightly focusing on the technology itself but another dimension to this is price. You might have a great idea that is way better than the competition but it doesnt matter how great it is if people arent willing to pay for it.
Because it’s an annual release cycle. Leaps ahead of competition happens as a result of years of research. If you release intermediate products every year, the leaps are broken up into smaller chunks. Plus your competition becomes very aware of what you’re building and because it’s an annual release cycle it usually doesn’t take them much longer than a year to catch up.
Plus technology is at a point where we’re beyond noticing significant changes at the hardware level that at one time would have been revolutionary. Hardware used to double in performance every other year and it was very noticeable when your base performance was lower. Now it’s so fast that we simply don’t notice what once would have been revolutionary advancements and take it for granted.
If you want an example, look at current EUV technology and sub-7nm chips. Current top of the line chips would be economically infeasible without EUV. EUV took 4 decades to become a reality and it required researchers to effectively build the machines from scratch because of how different it is from previous technology. For consumers, it’s just inevitable and the expected march of technology.
Another are the mRNA base vaccines. It took scientists about 5 decades to go from the first attempts at a mRNA vaccine to where we are today with the COVID vaccines and the first widespread use of the technology.
Phone makers usually make small leaps every year. Sometimes you get a bigger leap, like a few years ago when Apple added AI hardware to their silicon. One of the effects of this, for example, was it being able to process night photos almost instantly while that could take a few seconds on other phones doing the same processing on the CPU.
Because there never was a reason for this to happen. Why do you believe it should ?
Moore’s law is not a law but a simple observation. And it only talks about the transistor count on a chip, not its power.
At some point, engineers ran out of stuff to put on a chip . We added many instruction sets, tons of various cache, the whole northbridge, then memory controlers, then multiplied cores.
There are some chips that are complete systems, on a single chip (which are called ‘soc’ system on chip).
Now, to make it run faster, you need faster clocks; but we found out that going above 5GHz makes photons a problem, on regular operations. So we cant. Another way is to run colder, but not everyone can run their chips near 0°K.
Also, smaller transistors have been better, as they leak less energy, but they also make chips smaller, which is a problem when you want to dissipate heat. And we are at a point where we can hardly make them smaller.
For several years now, the research has been focused on that and on reducing power consumption. The computing power to consumed watts ratio has litterally skyrocketed.
Science works that way. When something is discovered, it opens a completely new field, so there is a lot to explore. Once most things have been explored and well understood, only fringe cases remain, so progress is slow, until something else major is discovered.
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