According to AMD, Moore’s Law Is Not Dead, But It Has Changed
To give you the big picture: In order to maintain the upward trend in prices for GPUs over the past few years, the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has said on multiple occasions that “Moore’s law has expired.” In the course of the summit, AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster refuted these allegations and revealed the real reasons behind the increased prices.
Since 2017, Jensen Huang has issued multiple statements announcing the demise of Moore’s Law. In most cases, this was a response to questions asked by customers regarding the consistent increase in price of Nvidia graphics cards.
In spite of the fact that Nvidia graphics cards are typically of high quality (the GTX 1630 being a particularly noteworthy example), consumers are not unduly concerned about the consistent upward trend in product pricing. As an illustration, Nvidia announced the GTX 780 in 2013 with a suggested retail price of $649. In the meantime, the starting price of an RTX 4080 was an astounding $1,199 a month ago.
This is an increase in price of approximately 85%; nevertheless, the worth of the dollar has not expanded in the same way over the course of the last nine years, despite the fact that the gain in productivity has undoubtedly been bigger. During a question and answer session with members of the media, Huang reiterated his previous claim that “Moore’s law is dead” after the release of the RTX 4090 and both variants of the RTX 4080.
AMD is attempting to sidestep Nvidia in the video card market by bucking recent custom, as stated in the previous sentence. Mark Papermaster, the Technical Director of Team Red, recently gave a presentation at a summit where he contradicted Jensen’s statement and emphasised that Moore’s law is still very much in effect today.
“It’s not that there won’t be any amazing new technology involving transistors… The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) stated that “it is very, very clear to me what progress we are going to make in order to keep advancing transistor technology; nonetheless, they are more expensive.” As a result, he continued, “therefore you have to make use of accelerators, GPU acceleration, unique functionalities…” in order to explain how AMD controls its production costs.
According to Papermaster, AMD anticipated a price hike and cited it as a leading cause in the company’s recent change to chiplets in both its processors and graphics cards. This information was gleaned from an interview with AMD.
Given that both AMD and Nvidia receive plates for processors from TSMC, it is difficult to understand why the two firms’ reports are in conflict with one another. The Green team appears to have made the decision to completely embrace the “Moore’s Law is dead” mindset, whilst the Red team seems to be trying to find a way around the “death” of Moore’s law that is supposedly being predicted.
Reports of the death of Moore’s Law have, in general, been grossly overstated, to paraphrase the great Mark Twain. Moore’s Law continues to hold true. (Okay, he didn’t say that.) However, despite the fact that the law is still in effect, ensuring that it continues to function properly is becoming increasingly challenging and expensive. The only thing that is up for debate is how each individual corporation will handle the situation.
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