Jensen Huang Q&A: Why Moore’s Law is dead, but the metaverse will still happen

Moore’s Law, posited by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore in 1965, stated that the number of components on a chip would double every couple of years. It was a metronome that signaled that every couple of years chip performance would either double or costs would halve.

And it held true for decades, based mostly on manufacturing advances. But with the laws of physics reaching their limit in terms of miniaturization, those advances are no longer taken for granted. Intel is investing heavily to make the law hold up. But Huang said that smart chip design has to take over, which is why the company shifted to a new architecture for its latest generation of graphics chips. The result for the 40 Series graphics chips is some outstanding performance coming out for PC games just as we head into a global downturn

Huang believes it’s more important than ever to keep the advances in performance and power efficiency going, as we’re on the cusp of building the metaverse, the 3D universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. Nvidia has built the Omniverse suite of standardized development and simulation tools to enable that metaverse to happen

But it won’t be a real metaverse unless it’s real-time and can accommodate lots more people than can access 3D spaces today. Nvidia plans to use the Omniverse to create a digital twin of the Earth, in a supercomputing simulation dubbed Earth 2, so it can predict climate change for decades to come.

With that, we should get the metaverse for free, and we’ll need all the chip processing power available. And he noted that AI, made possible by the graphics chips driven forward by gaming, will enable developers to auto-populate their metaverse worlds with interesting 3D content. In other words, gaming and AI will be helping each other, driving both chips and the metaverse forward. To me, that sounds like a new law is in the making there.