Question: Can HN please recommend specific things to read to understand any potentially lesser-known but interesting history of the "tick tock" strategy famously used for silicon chip improvements and rollouts for the past decades?

# Background

The popularly known version is something along the lines of: like clockwork, CPU improvement cycles consist of "tick" (shrink the architecture a little), then "tock" (improve the architecture), then repeated.

This obviously resulted in a long term trend of upgrades and capability increases.

# What I want to know

Is there documented history from the silicon industry of esoteric or lesser known business and engineering stories about "tick tock"? Specifically, could it have been possible or at least discussed to "move ahead" more rapidly, but instead, it made (far) more business and political sense to inch things along?

# Notes

- I anticipate a popular refrain saying that you have to innovate little by little, by the very nature of the improvements.

- I also anticipate that even a "broad and deep" traditional understanding/education of computer engineering and its history might not uncover this particular topic.

- Searching the web, it is sort of hard to find coverage of this exact topic I am looking for, even just to understand it better broadly.

Does HN understand the question, and, if so, has this topic been covered somewhere? Any books, oral histories, articles (academic or general), websites, or even documentary videos on the subject would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

# Aside/clarification

This question is only really about the hardware/chip/CPU aspects. There are related issues in software, systems, augmentation, etc. that I understand somewhat more about regarding issues of "missed/impossible leaps" and computer-human evolution/uptake, but this question is not about those issues really.

EDITS: 1) Minor wording update to specify focus area more clearly. 2) Improved formatting for readability.

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Ask HN: Reading on esoteric side of “tick-tock” silicon business strategy?

Ask HN: Reading on esoteric side of “tick-tock” silicon business strategy?