Submitted by Verificus t3_zqwc0j in singularity
great_waldini t1_j12h27y wrote
Reply to comment by Verificus in To all you well-read and informed futurologists here: what is the future of gaming? by Verificus
We have no reason to think GPUs will get substantially more expensive than they currently are. They’re artificially inflated the last couple of years because of the crypto frenzy - let’s hope proof of work dies soon.
As for 2-3nm silicone, that’s extremely unlikely to ever happen. We can actually already get lithography down to those scales (not on a mass manufacturing scale obviously) but the problem we run into at those scales is actually quantum tunneling. Which is to say electrons start to spontaneously jump the gap and effectively short circuit. This leads to unreliability of the compute processor. Think flipping ones to zeros and zeros to ones when they shouldn’t be flipping. That makes for big problems at the metal level needless to say.
AMD has demonstrated one alternative however to keep us true to Moore’s law - expanding the breadth of parallel processing with more threads. There will be other such innovations in architecture as well, and surely more on the manufacturing side too.
Consumers will always pay a premium to be on the cutting edge of high performance, but if Moore’s law has held true this long, I’m not worried about costs decoupling from the patterns they’ve so far obeyed anytime soon. It’s certainly a “Lindy” type of situation.
If GPUs reach $3-5k, it’ll be because of inflation. Not for any fundamental reason to the technology itself.
Verificus OP t1_j136zto wrote
I think you don’t get what I am referring to. 2nm and 3nm are real upcoming GPU production processes but obviously it is not really 2nm and 3nm, it’s how it is marketed. Doesn’t mean cost aren’t going off the charts, they will do so.
great_waldini t1_j141pcw wrote
I see - maybe I'm not up on the latest marketing BS for GPUs haha. At any rate, I'm curious what you think will be the driving force behind skyrocketing prices? Am I missing a hidden variable on manufacturing costs increasing? Or where do you picture that coming from?
Verificus OP t1_j142fs2 wrote
Basically this graph another user posted: https://i.postimg.cc/25ZV1Fjp/image.png
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