No surprise there, that Moore's Law requires a healthy competition environment for it to be likely to take effect and it's been a while since Nvidia had actual competition.
Of course it's much more complex than that. The nature of the problems that tech now has to solve is different and as stated in the article, Nvidia hit many roadblocks, but I still think if it had healthy competition, other brands would step in and make it more likely for a creative solution to manifest itself.
> Moore's Law requires a healthy competition environment for it to be likely to take effect and it's been a while since Nvidia had actual competition.
Moore's Law was an extrapolation on transistor density which is a manufacturing process in a chip foundry. NVIDIA is a fabless company that depends on physical process improvements from companies like ASML & TSMC.
So the competition you're speaking of is happening more at the foundry layer which would be TSMC vs Intel vs Samsung vs China-chip-maker (e.g. SMIC). At the lithography layer, ASML's EUV has no competition from Nikon and Canon.
Roadblocks they've seemed to put on themselves, in the name of market segmentation. There is a huge market sitting between consumer and "professional" GPUs, and nvidia is trying to milk the market as much as they can before any of the competitors get their shit together.
NVidia only has so much silicon area it can get from its partners. Right now AI datacenter silicon is worth much more than its weight in gold, but consumer grade silicon is worth a fraction of that.
I predict we are pretty close to the death of the GPU as a discrete component. We will have TPUs that live in work stations and data centers as discrete components, and integrated graphics cards that live on the CPU die.
Of course it's much more complex than that. The nature of the problems that tech now has to solve is different and as stated in the article, Nvidia hit many roadblocks, but I still think if it had healthy competition, other brands would step in and make it more likely for a creative solution to manifest itself.