Thursday, September 22nd 2022
Jensen Huang Tells the Media That Moore's Law is Dead
NVIDIA's CEO has gone out on a limb during a video call with the media, where he claimed that Moore's Law is Dead, in response to the high asking price for its latest graphics cards. For those not familiar with Moore's law, it's an observation by Intel's Gordon Moore that says that transistors double in density inside dense integrated circuits every two years, while at the same time, the cost of computers are halved. The follow-on to this observation is that there's also a doubling of the performance every two years, if maintaining the same cost. This part doesn't quite hold true any more, due to all major foundries having increased the cost when using their cutting edge nodes. We're also reaching a point where it's getting increasingly difficult to shrink process nodes in semiconductor fabs. However, Jensen Huang's statement has nothing to do with the actual node shrinks, which makes his statement a bit flawed.
Jensen's focus seems to be on the latter half of Moore's law, the part related to semiconductors getting cheaper, which in turn makes computers cheaper. However, this hasn't been true for some time now and Jensen's argument in this case is that NVIDIA's costs of making semiconductors have gone up. Jensen is quoted as saying "A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today than it was yesterday, and it's not a little bit more expensive, it is a ton more expensive," "Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past." What he actually meant is that we shouldn't expect semiconductors to be as cheap as they've been in the past, although part of the issue NVIDIA is having is that their products have to be produced on cutting edge notes, which cost significantly more than more mature nodes. It'll be interesting to see if AMD can deliver graphics chips and cards with a more competitive price point than NVIDIA, as that would refute some of Jensen's claims.
Sources:
Barron's, MarketWatch
Jensen's focus seems to be on the latter half of Moore's law, the part related to semiconductors getting cheaper, which in turn makes computers cheaper. However, this hasn't been true for some time now and Jensen's argument in this case is that NVIDIA's costs of making semiconductors have gone up. Jensen is quoted as saying "A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today than it was yesterday, and it's not a little bit more expensive, it is a ton more expensive," "Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past." What he actually meant is that we shouldn't expect semiconductors to be as cheap as they've been in the past, although part of the issue NVIDIA is having is that their products have to be produced on cutting edge notes, which cost significantly more than more mature nodes. It'll be interesting to see if AMD can deliver graphics chips and cards with a more competitive price point than NVIDIA, as that would refute some of Jensen's claims.
94 Comments on Jensen Huang Tells the Media That Moore's Law is Dead
and I bet RDNA3 matches if not beats rtx 4xxx series in raw fps and undercuts costs at same time. we will find out soon. Nvidia. lol.
The insane profits of the crypto boom and shortage have clearly warped this mans grip on reality.
LOLLLLLL
Btw, I think the best chance in years for AMD to flip the game has come. Every condition has been set. I hope AMD would not waste this opportunity. And I think it's pretty easy - just price RX 7000 reasonably and it'll be a win.
Bastard Huang is now bullying consumers after he's hurt nv partners and everybody else.
GTX 1660S (2019) = £199. 120w. 284mm2 die size (12nm), 6.6bn transistors.
RTX 3050 (2022) = £299. 130w. 276mm2 die size (8nm), 12bn transistors.
RX 6600 (2021) = £270. 120w. 237mm2 die size (7nm), 11bn transistors.
Basically the £270 AMD 2021 GPU shows a 4x larger performance difference (+28%) vs a £300 NVidia 2022 GPU, than that £300 NVidia 2022 GPU does (+7%) vs a £200 NVidia 2019 GPU, with a smaller die size, 1bn fewer transistors and lower price... nVidia's problem there isn't "Moore's Law", it's that "no we won't make £300 2022 GPU's any faster than £200 2019 GPU's, why on Earth would you want that? Here have this 64-bit GTX 1630 that's slower than our 2016 1050Ti made from leftover dies that we didn't sell to miners...") is simply an intelligence insulting ripoff, and blaming 'the laws of physics' as their "limitation" for having no decent low-end GPU's to show after 3 years of sitting on their behinds doing nothing is not very believable. Personally I'm waiting to see what the low-mid tiers of the RTX 4050-4060 / RX 7000 series will bring. Either nVidia get it together and refocus on significantly improving 4050 / 4060 core rasterization performance & efficiency at a sane price and correct their current "direction", or they can GTFO.
-- Jensen immediately after taking off the mic
That said, it's just something "we" made up, it's no universal law by any means.
People keep complaining about Nvidia and their prices (which unfortunately is going to force AMD to follow suit to please there shareholders), but as long as those same people keep buying Nvidia products, not only will prices not go down, they'll keep going up.
I actually regret not get a 6800 XT when they were selling at MSRP, but I didn't really have the money at the time.
Like stuff cannot be evolved we only just got Euv and haven't seen it's limit or exotic substrates yet
He lost connection with the reality. He doesn't know that we are in multiple crises, he doesn't know that the high-level inflation causes many people to stop consuming.
He simply lives in his own virtual reality.
But happy owner of a 10gb 6700 here which I bought 2 months ago for 375 bucks.
Waiting for competion from AMD!