system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How can chip manufacturers like Intel, AMD, and Apple keep giving huge improvements on performance every few months by changing the architecture?

I recently saw the comparison chart for the new M1X chips which give 50% improvement over the previous generation. I'm wondering if the semiconductor size remains the same and the die size is the same as well, then how can they manage to just keep changing the architecture every so often. If the architecture change takes so little time, then why don't all companies have the same performance? Is it just the chip architecture they change or is it something else as well?
gpt
There's a lot that goes into a new architecture (or micro-architecture as we usually call it).
You can also play a lot of games with "50% improvement" (for example, is that power/performance?)
Part of it is smaller transistors. It can come from a bigger die size (although that is more expensive).
Other than that, you can increase the size of structures on the chip (buffers and schedulers - as well as memory blocks). You can also change the algorithms you are using, to be smarter about processing instructions or prefetching data.