9 years ago nVidia sold a GTX960 card for $199 with a 200mm^2 die, 128bit, 2GB. Alone CPI put this card at $260 in 2023.
It's memory bandwidth and amount make it a bit below average actually, it's a crappy deal.
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/5274TCGTEFNAPCG7J7EJJQETEY.jpg)
www.reuters.com
AD107 is the successor to GA107. NVIDIA is pretending it is the successor to GA106. They've done this across the entire product stack excepting the 4090. But I guess it does look okay if you compare it to a card from 8 years ago.
By what metric?
Die size has nothing to do with pricing of a product which is using this die. The die itself is not the product and you're not buying the die. The price of such product is set by the market way more than by the cost of die production.
That is inflation for you. It makes everything more expensive and put it a category up.AD107 is the successor to GA107
Of course the new chip has more transistors. TU106 had way more transistors than GP104. In fact TU106 had nearly as many transistors as GP102. This is the nature of progress.
That "progress" is completely different now with cost of each transistor not scaling much on new processes.
It's okay if density progress slows down or stops for a while as long as cost/transistor goes down. With Ada the performance is there, the price is not. Gamers would be thrilled with a $400 4070. Whether this will ever happen when TSMC has a full monopoly on high performance silicon remains to be seen.
Cost/transistor hasn't been going down for quite some time now - at least by as much as people seem to think.
It hasn't been going down at all from what I've read. That needs to change. But I don't know whether it's a technical reality or a consequence of no competition. Making tiny transistors is hard and getting harder, but it this was always the case.
Advanced nodes are only getting more expensive to develop so the opposite will happen. It is quite possible that at some point cost/transistor will actually start to rise on more advanced nodes in comparison to some older one leaving only density (maybe) and power (likely) advantages to even using them.
Transistor cost is going up in the sense that wafer price is going up faster than transistor density. But transistors ain't transistors. Cache will be the densest feature of a device; IO the least dense. Thus a transistor that makes up part of an SRAM cell is far cheaper than a transistor that drives a PHY. Replacing a GDDR interface with a bunch of cache will certainly drastically increase the transistor count, but you could well end up with a smaller (and therefore cheaper) die at the end of the day
It's not the first time you went quite far into arguing for this statement.
What Qesa said. Memory PHYs hasn't been scaling that well on new processes for some time now. So if you want a wider bus you're either burning wafer area on dark silicon while still paying for it or adding more processing logic both of which puts such chip a step higher in price than you'd want.
It is an aspect but you as well as others are missing the point - die size is an aspect only when we're looking at the same production process in the same time period and likely made on the same architecture. So it matters in comparing AD107 to AD106 for example but it doesn't when you try to compare AD107 to GA107.
No. It always is a variable. You just have to make the case in any given comparison that it is of a lesser importance than whatever you alledge to be more relevant. Because it might be, or it might not be
