Is Moore’s Law Actually Dead This Time? Nvidia Seems to Think So

upstart writes:

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.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.