SAN JOSE, Calif. — AMD’s announcement of a 7-nm Epyc x86 CPU and Vega GPU generated a wave of hope that the chips will lower rising costs of high-end processors. The news also provided an example of the diminishing returns of leading-edge process technology and raised concerns about the quality of open-source code for accelerators.

In a Twitter conversation tagging our story on the news, a scientific researcher in Germany lamented that the $10,000+ price tags on high-end Nvidia V100s make them “nothing we can order easily with our funding guidelines.”

A researcher in England called the prices, which can top $15,000 for buyers in Europe, “not sustainable,” pointing to Intel and Nvidia gross margins in excess of 63%.

“I think Nvidia is making great products, but … this problem can only be solved by increased competition in both the CPU and GPU markets,” he said. “Please step forward, AMD, Cavium/Marvell, Fujitsu, Ampere … our science is suffering due to the current situation.”

Another person on the discussion thread posted a chart (below) showing the growing die sizes of Nvidia GPUs as the company pursued higher-performance parts.

First-generation Nvidia general-purpose graphics processors cost about $1,500, and “we all worried at how expensive they were compared to consumer GPUs,” said one researcher, bemoaning a 10× rise in costs. Click to enlarge. (Source: Hiroshige Goto)

AMD has clearly tried to shave costs with its 7-nm Epyc x86 CPU by implementing its memory controller and I/O in a 14-nm die. But how much price competition comes with the new AMD parts remains to be seen. If the 7-nm products are more successful than anticipated, AMD could find itself constrained by the number of wafers that it can get from TSMC, now its sole 7-nm provider.

Just before the parts debuted, Intel announced that it was focusing all of its capacity on high-end devices, claiming that it could not fill a resurgence of PC demand. However, overall demand is actually not rising; rather, Intel may have been trying to tempt AMD to go after low-end sockets, said analyst Mario Morales of International Data Corp.

With the exception of a modest uptick in enterprise demand, the PC market is not growing. In fact, the market in China for desktops and notebooks — which represents the largest slice of the overall PC market — is declining slightly, said Morales.