Nvidia boss Jensen Huang answers critical questions about the price of the new graphics cards.
The prices for Nvidia’s new graphics cards are making waves. Never before has an xx80 card cost more than 1,000 dollars at the RRP. In addition, this time there are two variants of the RTX 4080. However, the model with twelve gigabytes of VRAM, which is not only slimmed down in terms of the amount of memory, is considered by many to be a disguised RTX 4070 with a different name and price tag – not without reason, as the following article also finds:
Opinion on RTX 4000
Why I’m so torn apart like never before
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But why are the new graphics cards so much more expensive than their predecessors? Nvidia founder and boss Jensen Huang has now commented on this question in a question and answer session with journalists. However, the answers carry a message that we as customers cannot like:
It won’t get any better, just worse
Well, first of all, a 12 inch wafer is much more expensive today than it used to be. And it doesn’t just cost a little more, it costs a lot more. Moore’s Law is dead. And the option of providing the same service at half the price every year and a half, according to Moore’s Law, is gone. This is finally over. As a result, the notion that chips will become cheaper over time is a thing of the past.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia-CEO
However, other factors also play a role in the current rate of inflationwhich Huang did not address or in a different context: He cites increased energy costs and increasing inflation as reasons, for example. In addition, due to the general shortage of chips, Nvidia was forced to spend a lot of money in order to secure production capacity at the contract manufacturer TSMC at an early stage. You can find out which other factors could have driven Nvidia to the massive price increases in the article linked above.
What is Moore’s Law?
Moore’s law states that the complexity of integrated circuits regularly doubles with minimal component costs. The periods mentioned vary between twelve and 24 months. Complexity means the number of integrated circuits. Here, however, the number of transistors per unit area is also used again and again. The law is named after the American engineer, inventor and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
Well available: RTX cards at Amazon
What happens without Moore’s Law?
Although the production of chips is sometimes becoming more expensive due to the constant reduction in structure width and the associated increasingly complex manufacturing processes, Huang still promises increasing performance. However, this no longer results from the traditional idea of Moore’s law:
The future lies in accelerating the entire package (stack). You have to develop new architectures and come up with the most innovative chip designs possible. computing [Anmk. d. Red.: Datenverarbeitung, Berechnungen] Of course, this doesn’t just happen on the processors. Computing is a matter of software and hardware. That’s why we call it the full-stack challenge. And this is how we innovate across the entire stack.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia-CEO
In addition, Huang emphasizes that the performance of the new graphics cards at the same price point monumental
is better than that of its predecessors. The Nvidia boss is probably referring to the performance per euro spent. Of course, we can neither prove nor disprove that at this point. Only independent tests can provide clarity here.
At the end, Huang once again made it very clear that today’s prices are simply not comparable to those of the past. Advances in computer graphics plus more and more power and all of this at the same or even lower acquisition costs is simply not feasible.
how do you see it? Are you satisfied with Jensen Huang’s arguments? Or do you see completely different reasons for the price increases? Write it to us in the comments!
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