GPU prices remain painful. On that we can all agree. But can it really be correct that the per-transitor cost of chips hasn’t budged in a decade? So said Google’s Milind Shah last year, according to Semiconductor Digest (incorporating Memory Buses Weekly, or at least it ought to!).
More specifically, the claim (via Tomshardware) is that the cost of 100 million transistor gates within a chip are about the same today as back in the 28nm generation of silicon. In fact, according to Google, today’s 5nm and 3nm chips are actually slightly pricier per transistor.
Uh huh, you say, isn’t this all pretty obvious? Just look at graphics card prices. Yes… but also, no. Let’s take Nvidia’s 28nm GK104 GPU as an example. It first appeared in 2012 and was used in various GeForce graphics cards from the GTX 680 downwards.
Now, GK104 contained 3.5 billion transistors. Fast forward to today and the current Nvidia ‘104-class chip, AD104 as found in the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti, clocks in at fully 35 billion transistors.
So, that’s 10 times the number of transistors. Is Nvidia really paying 10 times as much for an AD104 die today as it did for a GK104 die in 2012? Again, …
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