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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Instead of an ad, here's a good description of the situation:https://semiengineering.com/why-scaling-must-continue/

Tl;Dr - old Moore's law is dead , but our new systems(ai , gpu...) still need a huge number of transistors , beyond what can be made on a single chip today, so scaling is still valuable.

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I thought about upgrading my GPU recently (an rx480 8gb from 2016), I was disappointed to find that even the rx5700xt was only double the performance of an rx580/rx480 (they're essentially the same GPU) [0]. It also costs double, this is THREE years later. (It turns out the rx 500 series have hardly dropped in price since release ~£200.)

So while Moore's law is still ticking along (albeit a little slower), and transistors are still shrinking (7nm vs 14nm). It doesn't really affect the price, so instead of being able to buy 4x the performance (transistors) for a similar price, it hasn't changed. It seems pricing is no longer based on cost, it appears to be based on what the market will pay.

Strangely, it doesn't seem to be the same with CPUs. During the same period, AMD has doubled in core/ transistor count between Zen 1 and Zen 3 while has stayed the same price[3].

[0]https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_rx_5700_xt_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen

This is a little misguided. The only reason that AMD is so cheap on the consumer side is that they genuinely want to take a crack at Intel's market share. With GPUs, they're only competitor is Nvidia, and as long as they are cheaper than Nvidia at a reasonable performance, they are fine.GPUs are extremely profitable while CPUs aren't as profitable (yet)

Wasn't this also true 3 years ago? I.e. it only explains profit margins, not the absence of a price/performance drop. And, well, they have the same number of competitors in both CPU and GPU, and I think even their market shares are very similar, no?

I only wrote about the GPUs initially (as I had been looking at them in the last week). Then I released the comparison to CPUs, which even included the same company. It just seems strange that two similar markets are functioning very differently. Increased fabrication costs don't explain what is going.

I have a feeling AMD wants some of Nvidia's market share too. In fact the reason Nvidia recently released all those 'Super' cards was to counter AMD's release, it's also rumoured that AMD had to reduce their prices as a result.

In many ways, Nvidia is acting like Intel did. AMD simply couldn't compete on performance so this allowed them to get cosy (Intel's high-end for consumers stayed at 4 cores for a decade, Nvidia's prices have been steadily raising for a while).

Also, a lot has happened in the last few years: RAM prices skyrocketed, Bitcoin mining drove up demand for AMD GPUs. However both of those have been over for a while now.

The rx480 was priced very aggressively, the $199 price grabbed some headlines (8gb card cost a little more). Given the die shrink and three years (plus the Ryzen cores doubling), you'd be forgiven for expecting the rx5700 to come in closer to $199, than the $349 (XT is $399) keep in mind that these new cards aren't much over double the performance.

While, it's no secret that shrinking fabrication is getting harder and more expensive (it's hurting Intel right now). Prices per transistor have dropped for CPUs and SSDs has dropped noticeably, even DRAM to an extent, but not GPUs...

Even demand for machine learning doesn't explain the price hike (GPUs are now being artificially handicapped, just as professional graphics have been, shifting demand to the even more expensive Tesla cards).

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