The CEO of Nvidia has a message to gamers complaining about the high pricing of the company's graphics cards. Don't blame us.
On Wednesday during a videoconference call Q&A with reporters, Nvidia (ticker: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang was asked about the broad negative reaction from the gaming community over the elevated pricing of its chip maker's new "Ada Lovelace" graphics cards.
"A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive""oday," he replied, citing rising chip making costs. "Moore's Law is dead ... It's completely over." The executive added the expectations of twice the performance for similar cost was "a thing of the past" for the industry.
Moore's Law is an old forecast of innovation for the semiconductor industry by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He said "the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months," offering performance and cost benefits over time.
Over the past day, many gamers on social media and message boards expressed outrage with the pricing of Nvidia's next generation gaming graphics chips, code-named "Ada Lovelace," which were revealed on Tuesday at its GTC conference.
At the conference, the company announced the coming RTX 4090 card and two versions of the RTX 4080 card, all of which will use the Ada chip architecture. The 4090 will sell for $1,599 and will be available on Oct. 12, while the 4080 cards will cost $899 and $1,199, respectively, and go for sale in November. For reference, the prior generation RTX 3080 was priced at $699 when it was released two years ago.
Huang said gamers need to compare performance on a price point-to-price point basis, adding the new Ada Lovelace cards are "monumentally better" versus the prior products at equivalent price points.