NVIDIA specialists recently admitted that the technological possibilities for creating even larger single-chip graphics processors will soon be exhausted, and one of the further ways of evolutionary development is the creation of multi-chip graphics solutions. It is appropriate to recall how the representatives of AMD and some industry experts praise the high-speed interface Infinity Fabric, which is designed to solve similar problems, but already in the segment of central processors.
Analysts at RBC Capital recently examined the parameters of the latest semiconductor products from NVIDIA and Intel, and concluded that the so-called "Moore's law" remains valid. It is an empirical rule that the density of transistors is doubled every 1.5-2 years.
As an example, the NVIDIA Volta computation accelerator was used, which, with a crystal area of about 815 mm2, contains 21.1 billion transistors. Compared with Maxwell's characteristics, the experts concluded that in two years NVIDIA increased the number of transistors by 164%, and the area of the crystal increased by 36%. Summarizing the indicators to the "common denominator", the authors of the study come to the conclusion that the density of the transistors in the case of NVIDIA products increased by 95%, and this roughly corresponds to a doubling in two years.
In the case of Intel products, the comparison is made on the basis of not the most obvious examples, but the arguments from this become no less convincing. Five years ago, the 61-core Xeon Phi computing accelerator contained 5 billion transistors on an area of 720 square meters. Last year, the company created the 22-core Xeon E5 family Broadwell, which placed 7.2 billion transistors on an area of 456 sq. M. The area has decreased by 37%, and the number of transistors has increased by 44%. As a result, the density of placement of elements per unit area of crystals increased by 127%. It remains only to note that this happened in three to four years, not two, so in the case of Intel products, it's appropriate to talk about slowing down the "Moore's law".