By virtue of its relentless pursuit of ever faster, ever more powerful GPUs, Jen-Hsun Huang has claimed that Nvidia, over the past 20 years, has driven the «cost of computing down by one million times».
When you look at the rising costs of modern graphics cards compared with their forebears, that's maybe hard to fathom. It sure looks like the cost of a GPU has just been steadily rising to most of us when we look at the objects of our silicon desires.
But when you look at just what the graphics chips of today are capable of, the level of raw computational power at the disposal of even a lowly RTX 4060 would have seemed borderline mythical 20 years back.
A GeForce 6800 Ultra from 2005 delivered a whopping 6.4 GFLOPS, while the bottom of the Ada Lovelace generation comes with 15,100 GFLOPS of processing grunt.
That's a whole world of difference from a $499 card of 20 years ago versus a $299 GPU of today. And that's not even a card anywhere near the top of the stack, nor close to what you'll get from Nvidia's most powerful enterprise GPUs.