This article is from WeChat official account:Love Faner (ID: ifanr) , author: Huang Zhijian, head Figure from: vision China
“Moore’s Law is over.” Huang Renxun, CEO of the semiconductor industry giant Nvidia, laid out this helpless fact in front of the public at the 2019 CES conference. The future slowdown of semiconductor development seems to have become an indisputable fact.
Moore’s Law was proposed by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel (Intel), and was proposed by Intel CEO David House Xiu Shan’s speculation on the future of semiconductors. There are three main versions:
The number of transistors that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months.
The performance of microprocessors doubles every 18 months, or the price drops by half.
The performance of a computer purchased at the same price doubles every 18 months.
However, at the 30-series graphics card conference, the gap between the two generations of graphics cards seemed to be another verification of Moore’s Law. Almost double the performance improvement at half the price. Consumers who have been accustomed to squeezing toothpaste updates from chip manufacturers such as Intel for several years were suddenly detonated.
1. The birth of a new “nuclear bomb” graphics card
At the press conference on September 1, Lao Huang presented the RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards for the second time at his kitchen development conference four months after the A100 was released. It marks the 30-series graphics card officially took over the banner of high-performance graphics benchmarking from the 20-series.
The three graphics cards are undoubtedly a huge improvement over the previous generation. From the performance chart given by NVIDIA at the press conference, it can be seen that the 3070 has reached the level of the previous generation flagship 2080 Ti in terms of performance, and the same positioning The flagship 3080 is 50% stronger in relative performance. You must know that the price of 2080 Ti has exceeded 10,000, while the price of 3080 is only half of that, priced at 5499 yuan.
As for the “beast-level” graphics card RTX 3090 that occupies three card slots and is equipped with an unprecedented 24 GB GDDR6X video memory, you only need to know that this graphics card priced at 11999 yuan will be the most powerful nuclear bomb of the new generation of desktop , The performance is twice that of the already powerful 2080 Ti, and it can support playing games with a high refresh rate at 8K resolution.
The latest generation of 30 graphics cards are designed using Samsung’s customized 8nm process technology. Among them, 3080 and 3090 use the latest GDDR6X video memory standard. The new heat dissipation scheme makes it a matter of course to surpass 2080 Ti.
In terms of interface, it supports HDMI 2.1 interface with a transmission rate of up to 48 Gbps. Compared with the HDMI 2.0 interface with only 18 Gbps, the new generation of graphics cards finally achieves a high frame rate of 120Hz at 4K or even 8K resolution. The huge amount of data transmission.
The new process technology allows the new generation of 30 series graphics cards to achieve greater breakthroughs in the density of transistors and stream processors. In terms of the number of transistors, 3080 is 50% more than 2080 Ti, reaching 28 billion transistors. In terms of the number of stream processors, 3080 is 100% more than 2080 Ti, which is a double increase of 8704 cores.
The hardware upgrade brings stronger computing power to the 30 series, which greatly improves the ray tracing effect of the 30 series. Even after the ray tracing effect is turned on, the frame rate of the game is still guaranteed, allowing high frame rates The picture and the exquisite light and shadow effects are no longer a choice between fish and bear’s paw.
The release of super graphics cards is not the whole content of this conference. Nvidia stated that super game performance is no longer all its pursuit. Games and the infinite possible development of game derivatives have become Nvidia’s new focus. . This includes four main directions, “gaming, live broadcasting, artistic creation and e-sports”.
One of the most impressive is the changes brought by Nvidia’s use of the powerful computing power of the graphics card to bring live broadcasts. The “Nvidia Broadcast” software launched makes live broadcasts a breeze.
“Nvidia Broadcast” can use powerful algorithms to achieve environmental sound noise reduction, high-precision character keying, and intelligent head shooting. All of these can be experienced not only on the latest 30 series graphics cards, but also RTX series graphics cards. Use this software to achieve this function. Achieving high-quality live game or remote conference effects at low cost will increase the demand for RTX high-end graphics cards.
2. Consumers’ response
The release of the 30 series graphics card not only represents the birth of a new nuclear bomb, but it really exploded in the hardware circle like a nuclear bomb. This kind of “increased quantity and reduced price” The inconceivable behavior happened to the savvy Lao Huang, making him the incarnation of a “capitalist of conscience”, and the users who are still buying 2080 Ti are also labeled as stupid and rich, and turned into talks.
On JD.com, Taobao and other shopping platforms, as long as you click on the latest buyer show of popular 2080 Ti products, you can see hundreds of comments at every turn, which is very rare for other products. In the comments, they laughed at buyers for not knowing technology, or kindly persuaded them to return the goods, or simply came to worship after seeing the jokes.
Unlike the buyer’s satisfaction evaluation of the 2080 Ti graphics card on the new shopping platform, there have been many “unlucky” sellers who regretted wanting to sell the 2080 Ti on the second-hand trading platforms such as Xianyu. The market for 2080 Ti has also plummeted, making good people worry about the business of graphics card vendors.
This worry is not unreasonable. In July of this year, Nvidia announced that its 20-series graphics cards would be discontinued, which led to video card vendors starting to hoard graphics cards. Various types of 20-series graphics cards have increased their prices to varying degrees. It even said that it had accumulated millions of stocks and prepared to use this time to make a lot of money. So when the 30-series graphics cards were released, consumers who had been struggling to increase prices for a long time applauded, hoping to teach those who stock up a hard lesson.
This kind of thought of venting anger may only be enjoyable in my heart. Businessmen who have experienced big storms said, “You may make a small profit, but I will definitely not lose.”
As early as when 10 series graphics cards surpassed 9 series graphics cards with absolute performance, merchants had a similar experience, and the final result was 10 series graphics cards.The card sales have become one of the most successful generation of graphics cards in Nvidia history.
The profits made by the 10 series graphics cards not only greatly compensated for the losses caused by the stock 9 series graphics cards, but also brought the graphics card industry back to life. I believe that with the 30-series graphics card’s super high cost performance and user reputation, it is not difficult to reproduce the success of the 10-series graphics card.
3. Behind the “Conscience” update
In fact, the NVIDIA 30 series graphics card does not reproduce Moore’s Law in a strict sense, because the number of chip circuits is limited by the difficult improvement of nano-level technology and has not been doubled.
However, looking at the performance improvement of the 3080 at only half the price of the 2080 Ti by 1.5 times, Moore’s Law does not seem to be completely invalid, but slows down the pace. How did Nvidia achieve such a “big sale”? As a graphics giant, why doesn’t it squeeze toothpaste like the CPU giant Intel?
From the analysis of the cost of the 30 series graphics card, there is no doubt that Samsung’s custom 8nm process for NVIDIA is the biggest contributor. The reason for constantly emphasizing its customized identity is that this 8nm is essentially an improvement from the 10nm process, which is actually a generation away from TSMC’s 7nm process.
Samsung’s 8nm process has a transistor density of approximately 61 million per square millimeter, which is about 50% behind the density of at least 96 million per square millimeter achieved by TSMC’s 7nm process.
Nvidia still chose Samsung 8nm. An important point is that the 8nm process, as a mature technology, can provide still good performance improvements while at least 30% lower than TSMC’s 7nm process. This This cost reduction is also an important factor in the price of new 30 series graphics cards.
Nvidia’s hard work, in the final analysis, is because it is under far greater pressure than Intel, which has already dominated the CPU industry. AMD is also the biggest competitor. Unlike Intel, which only needs to face AMD CPUs, NVIDIA is facing a full-scale attack launched by AMD’s joint host manufacturers.
Different from the victory of N-card over A-card in previous years, AMD’s Navi series has been able to compete with 20-series graphics cards in performance, allowing AMD graphics cards to return to the ranks of mainstream high-performance graphics cards. AMD’s effort is reflected in the host. With the release of PS5 and Xbox Series X two next-generation consoles, it was announced that the image quality of the console platform will be the same or even surpass that of high-performance PCs, and the heroes behind it all come from AMD’s new-generation graphics cards carried by the next-generation consoles.
According to the statistics of Jon Peddie Rearsh, NVIDIA’s independent display shipments still account for 80% of the market share. Nevertheless, Nvidia has already been defeated in the game industry’s position.
Nvidia’s relatively high pricing for the 20 series makes it not good in sales. If you want to attract more consumers to upgrade the configuration or attract console players to switch to the PC camp, launch a friendly price The high-performance graphics card is the most suitable choice, and judging from the response after the release of the 30 series, Nvidia seems to have had a good start.
If you have a need to update the graphics card in the near future, it is not a wise choice to start with a 20-series graphics card at this node.
RTX 3070 will be on sale in October, priced at 3899 yuan.
RTX 3080 will be on sale on September 17, priced at 5499 yuan.
RTX 3090 will be on sale on September 24, priced at 11,999 yuan.
“My friends who are still using the Pascal architecture (10 series), it’s time for you to upgrade with confidence.” Huang Renxun at the press conference Said with a smile.
This article is from WeChat official account:Love Faner (ID: ifanr)< /span>, Author: Huang Zhijian