The graphics card market is experiencing one of its best moments, thanks to cryptocurrency mining, artificial intelligence, and some models with a very good cost-performance ratio. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes this technology has an even greater destiny. During the latest edition of the GPU Technology Conference held in China, Huang said we are entering an era "beyond Moore's Law", and that his GPUs will very soon replace traditional processors.
The GPU vs CPU Cold War
The user doesn't see any rivalry between CPUs and GPUs. With their budget, they try to find the ideal combination, getting the best of both worlds and enjoying performance. But there is a kind of cold war between manufacturers, and the one that often highlights this is Nvidia. Of course, it has plenty of reasons to do so, since its GeForce chips are impressive wherever you look, and its progress in GPGPU has been enormous. More than once we've come across rumors that Nvidia could apply its knowledge to create new processors, but if we follow the latest words from its CEO Jensen Huang, that idea is a thing of the past. Nvidia doesn't want to manufacture CPUs, but rather aims to replace them.
Beyond Moore's Law
Huang took the stage at the latest GPU Technology Conference and said we are entering an era "beyond Moore's Law", which he sees as annulled and obsolete. He emphasized that the number of transistors in a CPU grew by 50 percent year after year, but performance rose by barely 10 percent. CPU designers have an increasingly difficult job ahead optimizing architectures for greater parallelism, while GPU improvements advance at a much faster pace. At the same time, graphics chips are "more suitable" in the field of artificial intelligence, so they will replace conventional processors very soon.
Intel's Response
Obviously, Intel rejects any possibility that Moore's Law is dead, although its latest moves suggest otherwise. The Santa Clara giant has been stuck on 14nm for four architectures, Cannon Lake was delayed until the second half of 2018, and nobody rules out further delays. Huang's statements are very interesting, but Nvidia's technology needs much more than pure firepower to retire processors. Software must be on its side, and x86 isn't going anywhere in the short term.
