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Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#51

Post by mrtranscendence »

hef19898 wrote: post #32
andrewstuart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is trying to reset expectations of consumers. Jensen aims to charge more for more GPU computing power into the future. This is because Nvidia has close to monopoly power this is able to break Moores Law single handedly.

Hell, they are able to sell graphic cards, well not nVidia themselves but still, in excess of 2k bucks. They'd be stupid not to try to keep prices that high, now the market seemlingy accept them.

The 4090 sold strong at first, but the rest of Nvidia’s 40-series offerings haven’t sold nearly as well. It’s still not clear if their attempt to reset expectations toward higher prices will work out in the long term, but in the short term it’s been a bit of a failure.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#52

Post by jokoon »

It's also crucial to not forget about wirth's law, that states that software is getting slower than hardware is getting faster.

So don't fall for software vendors that want to convince you that you need a faster CPU every x year. You don't.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#53

Post by martinpw »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #2

No, it is not over (yet). The node is nonsense. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9150552 DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2020.9150552 Edit: I have no idea why anyone would downvote a link to this article. It directly answers the question with a decent level of technical detail. We are nowhere near single atom sized features yet, despite what node names might lead you to believe. There's still quite a ways to go.

I didn't downvote, but maybe it was because the article can't be read without creating an account on the site?

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#54

Post by benaadams »

btilly wrote: post #4

Nvidia thinks that Moore's Law is dead. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/do-expensive-nvidia-g... Intel, by contrast, says that Moore's Law is still alive. But Intel is technologically behind, and it is easier to improve when there is someone to learn from, so maybe there is a wall that they haven't yet hit. Regardless, it is a very different law than when I was young, when code just magically got faster each y…

Dennard Scaling is dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling which is why things stopped magically getting faster (chips started getting too hot)

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#55

Post by soco »

shjake wrote: post #47
hef19898 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, they are able to sell graphic cards, well not nVidia themselves but still, in excess of 2k bucks. They'd be stupid not to try to keep prices that high, now the market seemlingy accept them.

They might be putting themselves in a similar position as Intel though (maybe worse since I don’t recall Intel ever being as greedy..) if their competitors eventually catch up. Unlike in gaming in the data center initial cost + performance per watt are the only thing that really matter (besides software, Nvidia has a huge moat there..). And in relation to how much Nvidia is charging per GPU total power costs are clos…

But does Nvidia have their own AMD-like foe waiting around the corner to fight them for the crown? I'm not sure there is in the near future anyone capable to sustain such a fight...

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#56

Post by ascar »

shjake wrote: post #47
hef19898 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, they are able to sell graphic cards, well not nVidia themselves but still, in excess of 2k bucks. They'd be stupid not to try to keep prices that high, now the market seemlingy accept them.

They might be putting themselves in a similar position as Intel though (maybe worse since I don’t recall Intel ever being as greedy..) if their competitors eventually catch up. Unlike in gaming in the data center initial cost + performance per watt are the only thing that really matter (besides software, Nvidia has a huge moat there..). And in relation to how much Nvidia is charging per GPU total power costs are clos…

> Unlike in gaming in the data center initial cost + performance per watt are the only thing that really matter

That's not true from a hardware perspective either. You can't just plug in 4 worse cards in the same rack. The savings on the graphics cards become less significant if you need to double/quadruple all other hardware to increase the number of racks. A 1U blade can easily cost $10000 without a graphics card.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#57

Post by andrewstuart »

hef19898 wrote: post #32
andrewstuart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is trying to reset expectations of consumers. Jensen aims to charge more for more GPU computing power into the future. This is because Nvidia has close to monopoly power this is able to break Moores Law single handedly.

Hell, they are able to sell graphic cards, well not nVidia themselves but still, in excess of 2k bucks. They'd be stupid not to try to keep prices that high, now the market seemlingy accept them.

They’re losing a lot of customer love.

IMO if Intel stay in the game it’ll be sorted out within a few years.

Nvidia may have good software but people like paying less money.

Paying less will win out.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#58

Post by eitau_1 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #29
btilly wrote: post #4

Nvidia thinks that Moore's Law is dead. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/do-expensive-nvidia-g... Intel, by contrast, says that Moore's Law is still alive. But Intel is technologically behind, and it is easier to improve when there is someone to learn from, so maybe there is a wall that they haven't yet hit. Regardless, it is a very different law than when I was young, when code just magically got faster each y…

Nvidia is trying to reset expectations of consumers. Jensen aims to charge more for more GPU computing power into the future. This is because Nvidia has close to monopoly power this is able to break Moores Law single handedly.

With little progress in performance, they're gonna compete with secondary market aka used devices.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#59

Post by aaron695 »

kpw94 wrote: post #27

Earlier today on HN there was a submission about great CPU stagnation. In the blog post was an interesting link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-tr... This graph to me show that while yes technically Moore's law of doubling transistor per "thing Intel or AMD sells you" is still holding, it has ended for single threaded workloads. Moore's law is only holding due to core count increase. For ev…

> Writing amazing programs taking full advantage of the core count increase is simply impossible (see Amdahl's law)

I don't see this as true at all, using Wikipedias example -

"a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, but a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, therefore only the remaining 19 hours execution time can be parallelized, then regardless of how many threads the minimum execution time is always more than 1 hour"

Just increase "19 hours" to "400 hours" execution time, it's possible to increase output as far as you want.

If you're mind set can't get past the "one hour" matters sure or change your mind set to the "19 hours" part of the calculation is what matters.

I don't fully get Gustafson's Law, but maybe it touches on this.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#60

Post by kaba0 »

hardware2win wrote: post #45
kpw94 wrote: post #27

Earlier today on HN there was a submission about great CPU stagnation. In the blog post was an interesting link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-tr... This graph to me show that while yes technically Moore's law of doubling transistor per "thing Intel or AMD sells you" is still holding, it has ended for single threaded workloads. Moore's law is only holding due to core count increase. For ev…

>Writing amazing programs taking full advantage of the core count increase is simply impossible (see Amdahl's law). Do you need theoretical full? Practical full is enough and still huge improvement over single core

That’s up the the program — if the non-parallelisable parts are big, then you won’t get big speedups no matter what — GPUs are used for tasks that are widely parallelisable, GUIs (as in desktop environments) won’t really benefit from a 10x faster GPU.
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