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Who cares? Moore's Law is not something that needs "saving". It was an observation of the time. It was bound to run up against physical reality. In 1965, he pr
by bena 3y ago
Who cares? Moore's Law is not something that needs "saving". It was an observation of the time. It was bound to run up against physical reality.
In 1965, he predicted a doubling of components every year for the next ten years. In 1975, he changed it to every 2 years. And he was probably only looking out to the next 10 to 20 years.
Because, you know, that's reasonable. Even Moore himself knew that it was impossible to continue indefinitely.
Yes, let's get better. Yes, let's try to find more ways to efficiently compute. But let's not be slaves to words spoken before we were born because they were easy to achieve back then.
- wmf 3y agoNividia is using "the end of Moore's Law" as an excuse to provide zero price/performance improvement. It would be pretty anti-consumer if that became the industry standard.
- dolni 3y agoI'm sure AMD would LOVE to eat Nvidia's lunch.
- wmf 3y agoYet they're not. They're selling very few GPUs at high prices.
- Buttons840 3y agoIs that because they have bad hardware or because of the CUDA monopoly?
- wmf 3y agoNeither?
- gymbeaux 3y agoMore the latter than the former these days, but at a macro level, like last 20 years, it’s more the former than the latter. Basically AMD has caught up (arguable, but let’s say they have) to Nvidia with respect to driver quality and hardware performance/power consumption, just in time for the world to become more concerned with how a GPU handles AI stuff than how it handles video games.
- causality0 3y agoI think the claim AMD has caught up with Nvidia drivers is untrue. Sure, they don't cause constant crashing in mainstream games anymore like they used to but that's where the improvement ends. AMD drivers are still broken enough you run into issues whenever you step outside the box. Emulation is universally worse on AMD, and that's when it's not completely broken. VR is the same way, and AMD is now six months late for their "we promise AI won't be busted on RDNA3" promise.
- gymbeaux 3y agoI've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard, especially when you consider "FineWine" (the common occurrence of AMD GPUs gaining performance over time through driver updates, while that seldom occurs on the Nvidia side). I've not experienced, at any point, from the Radeon 9550 to the Radeon HD 5750 to the RX 480/580 driver issues that prevented me from playing a game or anything like that. Also, NVidia on Linux has pretty much always been a nightmare. They're still working out Nvidia-specific issues with Wayland over there in Linux world. If you are on Linux, AMD is and has always been the way to go for your GPU if you wanted the best UX.
- causality0 3y agoI've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard Why do you say in that regard but then not bring up any examples of that regard? I said AMD is terrible at emulation, VR, and AI. As far as I know everything else might be great. AMD has problems on Xenia, problems on RPCS3, glitches and degraded performance on CEMU, Yuzu, and Ryujinx. The 7000-series has so many problems running regular VR games there's a performance disclaimer on AMD's own site. I say this as someone who really, really would like to buy a 7900XTX but can't because everything I'd actually want to use it for over my current Nvidia card is hamstrung.
- dotnet00 3y agoWasn't the 4090 roughly twice the performance of a 3090 at a similar cost?
- BeefWellington 3y agoThe 3090 and the 4090 are on different process nodes (8/10nm vs 4nm), so you'd expect the 4090 to be more efficient. Pumping the same (or in this case more) power through a more efficient node should result in improvements in performance. Hardware Unboxed covers this pretty well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s You can see that compared to the 3090Ti or the 6950XT* it's sipping power when it's performance limited. I think what many gamers see though, is that the performance difference is about all you'd expect going to 4nm from 8nm, based on performance gains we've seen in the past from other chips. Anyway, the rough idea is: If I built a 3090 on a 4nm node it would perform the same. Plus, NVidia has a track record of how they behave when the competition isn't up to snuff. Now, this is silly because using a more leading edge manufacturing process takes a ton of work and is an improvement overall. [*]: The 6950XT is manufactured on a 7nm node from TSMC. Note that there is weirdness in how each company measures their process node, which I won't go into here but just be aware that a TSMC N7 process might not be 7nm sized parts for all parts, and a lot of it has to do with how well they can layer things.
- dotnet00 3y agoThe person I replied to said price/performance, not efficiency. With the high end chips I think they're simply of the opinion that performance is more important than efficiency (and I don't really pay attention to the lower range too much these days), and thus like most other high end desktop parts, they're all clocked as high as the chip and cooling can handle, even if dialing it back a little would drastically improve efficiency.
- dghughes 3y agoAncient Greeks believed life involves and needs two types of suffering one is war which is destructive the other is competition. Competition benefits society it enlightens it moves it forward. Competition isn't meant to destroy your competitor that would be war. Moore's Law may be a type of good suffering.
- stefncb 3y agoMoore even later admitted that he made an insane guess for marketing.
- hindsightbias 3y agoPeople will care when HW stops being able to keep up with SW bloat.
- NovaDudely 3y agoFor his prediction to last as long as it has is an achievement on its own. Anyone that can predict 20 years out and be within 50% of a target on whatever field is a win to me. Moore should be chuffed it stood so long.