Intel CEO says Moore’s Law alive and well

Intel Corp. disagrees with Nvidia Corp. when it comes to Moore's Law, as Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger unveiled a budget gaming card Tuesday, a week after Nvidia released a line of gaming cards that many criticized as being pricey.

Gelsinger said Intel INTC, will launch its Arc A 770 graphics processing unit for a list price of $329 on October 12, the same day Nvidia NVDA is releasing its flagship RTX 4090 card for $1,599.

Last week at Nvidia's GTC conference, the lead GPU maker said it was going to release a new line of gaming cards using Lovelace architecture, starting at a list price of $899. The day after the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled his gaming cards, he addressed criticism that the company hiked the price of the new cards, arguing Moore's Law was dead. Moore's Law is the standard the chip industry has followed for decades in that every two years the number of transistors one can fit on a chip should double. The law is no longer applied as chip architectures become more complicated and silicon wafers become more expensive, according to Huang.

Gelsinger, on the other hand, said Moore's Law is alive and well in his keynote. Since Gelsinger was an Intel engineer, Intel used the x 86 architecture to design it back in the 1970s.

Nvidia uses the architecture developed by Arm Ltd. that executes commands differently than x 86 chips. In February, Nvidia's $40 billion deal to acquire Arm from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group 9984 fell apart and settled for a 20 year license of year license for Arm technology.

Read: Intel changed the name of its chips, but analysts say the story hasn't changed.

The CEO used his keynote to play up the use of open source software when it comes to Intel chips, and Gelsinger welcomed Linux open-source operating system creator Linus Torvalds to the stage.

Torvalds has criticized Nvidia over the years for using a closed proprietary ecosystem and not safe for work, and dissented Nvidia a decade ago.