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Comment by tomcar288 | Hacker News Reader

can someone explain to me, why faster and faster chips are required? I look at my iphone 7+ and my wife's iphone 11 and her's is no more capable than mine, other than maybe wireless charging. our stupid new washing machine has chips in it and it doesn't do any better job than the last chipless model we had. and i'm seriously not looking forward to getting a new car with screens all over the place rather than knobs that actually work. my latest work computer a brand new mac doesn't do anything i need that can't be done by my 2014 macbook pro.

where is all this drive to smaller and faster and faster coming from? and why?

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People do play games on phones and for 3D games an iPhone 7 vs iPhone 11 makes a huge difference. And then we don't even take into account the silicon that they use to post-process photos. Photos on later iPhones are significantly better. Partly due to better sensors, partly due to better lens systems, partly due to huge processing improvements.

Or to make another comparison. An 2016 MacBook Air was pretty mediocre-performance-wise and would require loud fans to spin up for a minimal amount of work. The 2020 MacBook Air M1 was about as fast in compiling Rust projects as a Ryzen 3700X (with 65W TDP), while being completely passively cooled and therefore quiet.

Also, incremental improvements are how we get from a big 4.77MHz XT to a supercomputer in your backpack. It's a bit akin to saying: I have a 4.77MHz XT and my wife an 8MHz AT and I don't really see the difference when running WordStar. The AT is an improvement over the XT, perhaps not noticeable for for some applications, but year-over-year improvements are needed to make big leaps over longer time periods.

I agree. I think phone hardware became "good enough" a few years back (as PCs did around 2010). The last time I upgraded is only because the repair guy changing my battery broke the cell antenna. I'm fine using a 10yo flagship phone, IF it's not sabotaged by the OS and app developers bloating what runs on said hardware.

I can't think of any apps other than games and the browser that need anything above a 10yo phone to run perfectly.

For mobile games, that's a given, but it's something that only kids care about.

As for web browsing, it will forever be trash because HTML/JS is such a shit and inefficient way to access information. You could put a quantum computer in the phone and it still won't be as responsive as a native app using a fraction of the resources.

>I think phone hardware became "good enough" a few years back (as PCs did around 2010).

PCs became "good enough" for speed back then, but not for power consumption. There's always room for improvement there, and modern laptops really blow 2010-era laptops out of the water when you look at that metric, and also size/weight.

> I look at my iphone 7+ and my wife's iphone 11 and her's is no more capable than mine

I mean… it is more capable, by a lot, and so are the current 14s.

The question is… do you use it? You may not. That’s fine. But some people do.

Not least the hardware can do more with less power. That’s pretty incredible. Plus faster graphics, memory, and cpu all improve overall responsiveness. That’s without going into the camera, neural engine, on chip image processing, etc.

These all improve with each generation. There is absolutely a difference, especially between a gap of 4 versions like you have.

But it’s ok that you don’t need it. Many other of us certainly do appreciate the improvements though!

> can someone explain to me, why faster and faster chips are required?

We keep piling up abstraction layers that effectively cancel out any processing speed improvements, so the only way to get better performance (user perceived) now is to push for better hardware (which is increasingly prohibitively expensive to do at this point).

That's what you get when the only way people build software these days is in a browser, with JavaScript/Python/WASM and 3-layers deep Docker containers. With layers of sandboxes in-between, and countless libraries and API abstraction layers for every single little thing.

Look at how bloated apps like Teams/Zoom/Slack are - sending a fucking plaintext buffer between two computers without using at-least 1GB of RAM on each client machine is somehow an unsolved problem in 2023.

There are far more chips made other than just smartphone or laptop chips. In the last few years my coworkers, former coworkers, and myself, have worked on server chips for the cloud, GPUs, machine learning accelerators, 400+ gigabit networking, 5G tower chips, and tons of other stuff. Most chips are not in end consumer applications but in something you may be using indirectly like a network switch on the Internet in a giant data center

Whole world moves as fast as semiconductor do.

Some things werent possible with computational power of the e.g year 2000 and now are.

I mostly agree about the phones, but laptops?

Man, it used to be (in the Ultrabook era and before) you'd get a thin and light that's drastically underpowered, runs hot, has a terrible screen and/or keyboard, has a battery life of 3 to 5 hours, and no GPU. Even the premium laptops like the Lenovo X1 were a series of tradeoffs.

Now for a similar price, a modern MacBook is fast, silent, can play casual games or do GPU accelerated editing, has industry leading screens, and lasts all day. And they finally have HDMI ports again (heh).

In my 30 years of laptop usage (almost entirely Windows and Linux), the Apple Silicon Macs are far and away the best laptops to have ever been made. Nothing else even coming close. Things that feel slow on my 2019 i9, and cause the fan to run full blast, are multiple times faster and cause no noise at all on the M1. And this thing is more powerful than the top of the line Alienware gaming laptops from a few years ago, the things that weight like 18 lbs and another 5 for the charger. The efficiency makes a huge difference in my daily quality of life.

Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it makes my work so much nicer. Of course, if you don't value the same things... good for you! I'm jealous, and wish I weren't such a gadget head.

Obvious applications: anything machine learning related (self driving cars, etc); Photo and video processing on your devices; Graphics processing; Simulation of a million different things, computation for a million different projects.

Your question could be posed to anything. Why does someone want a smaller battery? Perhaps they want their electric car to weigh 500 pounds less so it gets more range. Why didn't we stop when computers were the size of buildings?

We don't really need most of this stuff anyway. I survived just fine back in the day without mobile phones.

As to the drivers.. performance, efficiency, consumer expectations, smaller devices such as wearable and IoT, and a competitive market where if you deliver on these you get a ton of consumers.

They enable applications you, nor I have considered yet but someone else has.

There are all sorts of things that a new phone can do that one from a few years ago, even if you don't personally use it. Similarly even if you don't play games, plenty of other people do.

It's also incorrect to only consider phones, as TSMC manufactures many (most?) of the non-x86 laptop/desktop CPUs, where performance is much more overtly desired.

The final point is that this isn't just a matter of smaller equals faster, but also smaller equals less power - which I assume does matter to phone users.

Faster and more energy efficient chips will continue to open up new consumer product categories, just as they have with the desktop, laptop, smartphone, smart watch, and smart home thing.

Major companies seem to be betting that AR eyeglasses that look like normal glasses instead of ski goggles will eventually replace smartphones.

On the data center side, the whole AI revolution has been largely driven by available compute.

Javascript.

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