NVIDIA held the conference event “GTC 2022” from September 19th. In addition to the unveiling of the new GPU GeForce RTX 4090/4080, the CEO of the company gave a keynote speech and a Q&A session. Among them, it seems that the sad prospect for the user was told that “the price decline trend of GPU is over”. Overseas media Digital Trends and others report.
NVIDIA is a well-known semiconductor manufacturer for GeForce series GPUs (and graphic boards). At GTC 2022 held by the company, the new architecture Ada Lovelace adopted GPU “GeForce RTX 4090” and “GeForce RTX 4080” were announced. It was revealed that the RTX 4090 will be released from October and the RTX 4080 from November (Related article). While the specs and new technology attracted attention, it was the price that made an impact on users. Frankly speaking, it is expensive.
First of all, for the RTX 4080, the price for the domestic market is 164,800 yen for the 12GB memory model and 219,800 yen for the 16GB model. And the RTX 4090 is said to start at 298,000 yen. It’s quite expensive, close to 300,000 yen. It is natural that the price of the latest graphic board is high. On the other hand, when the GeForce RTX 30 series was announced, the price of the “GeForce RTX 3090” was set at 229,800 yen (Related article). Although it is not possible to make a simple comparison, it is undeniable that the price of the high-end model has dramatically increased.
Furthermore, at GTC 2022, it seems that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang himself said that the price of such GPUs should not be expected to drop.Digital TrendsHuang made the remarks during a media Q&A session at the event, according to sources.PC World, another overseas mediaGordon YoungIt looks like he threw a question at Huang regarding GPU pricing. And when asked, he said that it was a view that “GPUs are becoming cheaper, it will be a story of the past.”
In response, Huang first commented, “Moore’s Law is dead.” Moore’s Law is a prediction known by indicators such as “in 1.5 to 2 years, the transistor density of an integrated circuit will double.” In other words, Mr. Huang denies the wishful thinking that “high-paced technological improvements will make it easier to obtain high-performance hardware at low prices.” Huang went on to say that the price of silicon wafers used to make semiconductor devices has been rising. The increase in material costs will also be reflected in the price.
The pace of improvement in the performance of integrated circuits slows down, and soaring material costs. Huang seems to think that these will make GPU prices more expensive than they used to be. Naturally, it is expected that the performance per price of GPU will continue to improve gradually due to the generational change of parts in the future. However, it is unlikely that prices will fall at the same pace as before. On the other hand, he emphasized that the performance of this 40 series GPU, which is in the same price range, is “extremely good” than the company’s GPU in the price range of $ 899 / $ 1599 in recent years. He touts the superiority of the new Ada Lovelace architecture. It seems that the generational change has progressed to a performance that is firmly commensurate with the price.
NVIDIA head Huang’s take is pretty sad for PC gamers looking for high-end PCs. Meanwhile, AMD, the company behind GeForce rival Radeon, is gearing up to announce a new GPU. In August, a demonstration of the operation of the new GPU adopting the new architecture RDNA 3 was shown.The other day, the company’s executives announced the official unveiling of the new AMD GPU on November 3rd.suggestionis doing. I would like to watch the future of the GPU price competition in such a situation.