If you were not aware, the famous Moore’s Law is not relevant anymore. This is because GPUs are progressing at a lot quicker rate than CPUs. This happens to be the big message from the CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang. He made this statement while attending the 2017 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) that took place in Beijing, China. He emphasized that graphics processors will eventually totally replace CPUs, as has been reported.
For those who do not remember, Moore’s Law was the name assigned to observations from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the year of 1965. Moore had took note of the fact that the amount of transistors for each square inch on an integrated circuit was doubling each year, and he predicted this would indeed happen over the next decade. He came back later and revised this prediction to every couple of years.
Most of the time when Moore’s Law is thought to be ending, it is because of technical obstacles which block the progress of jamming more and more transistors into smaller and smaller areas, and while maintaining identical jumps in performance. Huang agrees in part with this, so much as it deals with CPU performance—he claimed that as CPU transistors has had a growth rate of 50 percent each year, the jump in performance has only been 10 percent.
The second reason he feels that Moore’s Law is no longer applicable is simply because of its ability to maintain pace with the GPU design advancements. Huang mentioned how the GPUs were growing in computational ability across the years, and the ways they are much better suited for artificial intelligence advancements.
Huang also stated that GPUs will be replacing CPUs very soon, because at this juncture, designers are actually hindered working out highly advanced parallel architectures for the outdated CPUs.
It is pretty obvious that Intel will disagree with this outlook by Nvidia, and has done so on several occasions. About a year ago, CEO of Intel Brian Krzanich had downplayed reports that Moore’s Law was coming to a close.
“In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times. As we progress from 14 nanometer technology to 10 nanometer and plan for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well,” Krzanich said in his blog posting which outlined future plans of Intel. “Intel’s industry leadership of Moore’s Law remains intact, and you will see continued investment in capacity and R&D to ensure so.”
Even recently, Intel has brought up the topic of Moore’s Law when they were showcasing for the very first time a 10nm Cannon Lake wafer at their Technology and Manufacturing Day which took place in Beijing.
“Intel manufacturing processes advance according to Moore’s Law, delivering ever more functionality and performance, improved energy efficiency and lower cost-per-transistor with each generation,” stated Stacy Smith, who is the group president of Manufacturing and Sales. “We are pleased to share in China for the first time important milestones in our process technology roadmap that demonstrate the continued benefits of driving down the Moore’s Law curve.”
Bascially, all of these amounts to chest thumping on each side, as there is nothing really at stake other than boasting rights for each company. While Huang is not necessarily claiming that GPUs could power up consumer PCs and desktops while dumping CPUs in the trash, he does see GPUs playing a huge role with supercomputers in the future.
