14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang recently talked about the decreasing relevance of Moore’s Law and about the fact that GPUs might soon be more powerful than CPUs, eventually replacing them.
We know right now that each part of the hardware in a PC has its role. The CPU does one thing, and the GPU does another. That line has been getting a little bit blurry in past few years, with some tasks being shared between the two resources.
And then again we have Moore’s Law that states that the transistors in every square inch are doubled every year. That was true for a long time, and then the law was changed and the time frame modified to two years.
Of course, it’s clear that Moore’s Law has an end because transistors can only shrink so far. At one point the manufacturing process will encounter quantum limitations, and that will be the end of it. Until then, we still have parallel computing to fall back on.
Nvidia is coming up fast
What Jensen Huang is trying to say is that Nvidia GPUs are becoming more powerful in a much shorter time than CPUs, and they are using similar production technologies. According to a report on segmentnext.com, Nvidia’s CEO thinks that the CPUs time on this planet is coming to an end.
A number of companies such as Alibaba and Tencent are already investing in the Nvidia Volta GPU for their cloud needs and HGX-based GPU servers.
To be fair, when Nvidia is talking about replacing CPUs in the coming years, they are referring to servers. The same process will take a lot longer on the desktop if it will ever happen.
You can also rest assured that Intel and AMD are not staying put while this takeover is happening. In fact, Intel has plans for many years. They are currently pushing a new processor built on 14nm technology, and they are working on 10nm and 5nm. It’s quite likely that quantum computing will be a real thing before a practical limit is reached by the regular manufacturing process.