Huang's Law

‘There’s a new law going on and I think this is the future of computing’

… the speed-up that we created in the last five years is 25 times while Moore's Law is ten times in five years. Moore's law the miracle of laws, the law that has enabled just about every single industry and progress of science and the progress of society, was compounded over time 10x every five years. Our GPUs have accelerated these molecular dynamics simulations 25x in the last five years. There's a new law going on it's a supercharged law. There's a new law going on and I think this is the future of computing …

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first referred to a ‘new law’ during his keynote presentation at Nvidia’s GTC conference in 2018.

It didn’t take long for this ‘new law’ to get a name. Tekla S Perry, writing in IEEE Spectrum, reported on the event with:

Move Over, Moore’s Law: Make Way for Huang’s Law

Graphics processors are on a supercharged development path that eclipses Moore’s Law, says Nvidia’s Jensen Huang …

Huang, who is CEO of Nvidia, didn’t call it Huang’s Law; I’m guessing he’ll leave that to others. After all, Gordon Moore wasn’t the one who gave Moore’s Law its now-famous moniker. …

But Huang did make sure nobody attending GTC missed the memo.

The name was picked up by others. Christopher Mim’s in the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2020 that:

Huang’s Law Is the New Moore’s Law, …

But a different law, potentially no less consequential for computing’s next half century, has arisen.

I call it Huang’s Law, after Nvidia Corp. chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years.

Mim’s article quantifies the improvement seen over the previous eight years, based on data supplied by Nvidia’s chief scientist Bill Dally, and - unlike Huang’s keynote - specifically highlights performance on AI related calculations:

Between November 2012 and this May, performance of Nvidia’s chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI calculations, says Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of progress that makes Moore’s Law pale in comparison.

The end of the article recognises that Huang’s