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posted by hubie on Sunday September 25 2022, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-thought-you-were-dead dept.

Chips "going... down in price is a story of the past," CEO says:

When Nvidia rolled out its new RTX 40-series graphics cards earlier this week, many gamers and industry watchers were a bit shocked at the asking prices the company was putting on its latest top-of-the-line hardware. New heights in raw power also came with new heights as far as MSRP, which falls in the $899 to $1,599 range for the 40-series cards.

When asked about those price increases, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the gathered press to, in effect, get used to it. "Moore's law is dead," Huang said during a Q&A, as reported by Digital Trends. "A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today. The idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past."

[...] Generational price comparisons aside, Huang's blanket assertion that "Moore's law is dead" is a bit shocking for a company whose bread and butter has been releasing graphics cards that roughly double in comparable processing power every year. But the prediction is far from a new one, either for Huang—who said the same thing in 2019 and 2017—or for the wider industry—the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors formally announced it would stop chasing the benchmark in its 2016 roadmap for chip development.

[...] As Kevin Kelly laid out in a 2009 piece, though, Moore's law is best understood not as a law of physics but as a law of economics and corporate motivation. Processing power keeps doubling partly because consumers expect it to keep doubling and finding uses for that extra power.

That consumer demand, in turn, pushes companies to find new ways to keep pace with expectations. In the recent past, that market push led to innovations like tri-gate 3D transistors and production process improvements that continually shrink the size of individual transistors, which IBM can now push out at just 2 nm.

The point here is that Huang's purported "death of Moore's law" isn't entirely up to Nvidia. Even if Nvidia can no longer keep its processor power increases on trend at consistent prices, they're not the only game in town. AMD, for instance, is already teasing that its soon-to-be-announced RDNA 3 cards could sport some larger-than-expected improvements in efficiency and overall processing power, thanks to some new chiplet-based designs.

While it's much too soon to say how AMD and Nvidia's new chips will compare, this is the kind of market competition that has traditionally kept hardware makers from becoming too complacent in the push toward new frontiers of relative hardware power (see also: Apple Silicon versus previous Intel-based Macintoshes). In other words, even if Nvidia can't figure out how to keep up with Moore's law these days, someone else might.

Or is this just nVidia hype?

Previously:
    Intel Unveils Plan to 'Propel Moore's Law Beyond 2025'
    Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Says Moore's Law is Back
    Please, No Moore: 'Law' That Defined How Chips were made is no Longer True
    Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law
    Death Notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018
     . . .


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2022, @09:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2022, @09:02PM (#1273629)

    > it got re-defined

    I think you'll find re-imagined and the CEO took a 2x pay rise.

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