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.