Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law. Over at AnandTech, I came across of a graph of iPhone performance over time and decided to look up the dates of each phone’s release. Updated graph.

iPhone: June 2007
iPhone 3G: July 2008
iPhone 3GS: June 2009
iPhone 4 (A4): June 2010
iPhone 4GS (A5): October 2011
iPhone 5 (A6): September 2012
iPhone 5s (A7): September 2013

Apple is coming out with a new model that about doubles performance in less than 18 months. Closer to 12 months usually. (I left out the iPad models, for instance, the A4 really came out in the beginning of 2010. Also, the 3G didn’t improve performance, but the 3GS appears to have made up for that.) How long will this continue?

Clearly with the 5s, Apple has continued pushing things for one more year. And 64-bit.

On the desktop side, I haven’t felt the impact of improving processors that much. Individual features like AES-NI are great, but otherwise my six year old T60 still feels pretty snappy. In comparison, I kept my iPhone 4 around just in case, but it feels really sluggish compared to the 5. I noticed it felt faster after upgrading, but it was harder to appreciate at the time. I’d rather be stuck downgrading to a six year old laptop than a two year old phone.

Will there someday be the ARM version of a Pentium 4? A processor that’s too hot and too power hungry to beat it’s predecessors? The iPhone performance gains have come, in part, from ramping up frequency from 400 to 1200 MHz. Will we see 3.6 GHz phones in a few years or is there a wall just over the horizon?