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
Even if they can't sell, they have two options:
- to hide the inventory;
- to do whatever it takes to convince the clients that these are "wrong" and should pay whatever is asked.
I'm on a laptop instead of a desktop. Laptops, Nvidia+intel rules the market.
I was looking forward for those new AMD 6000 series APUs on the laptops, but after waiting for months, I went with a intel 12th gen cpu. To this day, 6000s APUs are still very rare.
And what is Nvidia doing? Being a crybaby saying moore law is dead because it can't produce a high performance gpu without almost doubling previously established power limits lol
Foundries have become more expensive, he's not wrong, but some other things didn't and it's still on nvidia to design better stuff, not just rely on fabs advancing their nodes
and it was much cheaper during the entire life cycle. AMD has already been within striking distance performance of Nvidia, and undercut them in price. its one of the reasons I love them.
even in the Ati AGP days this was true.
RX 6950 XT $1000 ------ RTX 3090 $1070
RX 6900 XT $680 ------ RTX 3080 Ti $870
RX 6800 XT $580 ------ RTX 3080 $704
RX 6800 $520 ------ RTX 3070 Ti $610
RX 6700 XT $370 ------ RTX 3060 Ti $450
RX 6650 XT $280 ------ RTX 3060 $400
RX 6600 $240 ----- RTX 3050 $300
ok yes,........ but I don't see no invoice saying how much more.
Also for an over simpllification and simple math, say 8nm process then move to 4nm. 8x8 = 64nm2 and 4x4 = 16nm2. So a factor of 4, so if the same chips were fabbed, (neglicting yields, etc) a 4nm wafer should yield 4x the chips as an 8nm wafer. So if the cost is 4x (400%) more for the 4nm wafer over the 8nm wafer, the end price should be roughly the same per chip. Now of course if the transistors double........