system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How are computer chips still going faster and faster every year as we are reaching the smallest size of transistors in them?

For example, the new Apple M2 Chip. I know the old M1 chip was already fast and efficient compared to other chips out there. M1 also had around 114 billion transistors. The new M2 probably has more than that. How are they able to do it for the same size of chip? And what makes it more efficient and faster?
gpt
Imagine that the computer's cpu is like a baker. They're handed recipes, and their job is to bake them as fast as possible.

For decades, the solution was just to make the baker work more quickly.

Eventually, we hit a limit. It's going as fast as possible.

So how do we make it faster? We make it more efficient and smarter!

We started packing multiple complete kitchens into one (multi-core cpus). Now in the same kitchen-on-a-chip, you can have 4 or 8 bakers all working independently and not interfering with each other.

Bakers were spending a lot of time running to the pantry and back, so we added an expensive but very fancy "cache" - a place where they can store common ingredients within arm's reach, saving costly trips to the pantry.

Bakers were spending a lot of time waiting for one step to complete before going on to the next step. Now the bakers have really sophisticated logic that enables them to understand when it's safe to skip ahead and do another step while waiting for a previous one to complete.

Every new generation of chips has dozens of ideas like this one. Each one improves performance by a small amount overall, but put together they make a pretty big difference.