> I get the point but that's also a little like saying Windows is quite simple software because it is simply full of 'if' and 'for' and 'while'.

Not really, the cores are really similar units.

> A modern great CPU or GPU chip is not that simple to design.

Of course not, for starters there's not just the shader cores (a 4090 also has 512 TMUs, 176 ROPs, 128 RTX, and 512 tensor cores), you need to design all of these before you can replicate them, then you need to design the common components.

But the point was that the 50 billion transistors were not designed for individually, there is a large amount of block reuse. Your analogy would hold if windows inlined everything.

I just used that original phrase as another way of saying 'extremely sophisticated hardware'. Didn't mean for people to get hung up on the number.

"Extremely sophisticated" has many axes. An "extremely sophisticated" car might mean the engine is sophisticated, or the dashboard electronics are. The two are rarely correlated.

NVidia clearly has spectacular software and digital hardware designers.

Mechanical, analog, and power engineering are entirely different disciplines.

I know. The story is about a crappy pack-in cable, and how it's snatching defeat from the jaws of victory regarding product sentiment.

To be fair, judging from the latest tear-down video from GN, their mechanical and heat engineering team is also on top of their game.

Not really because nVidia already had previous designs as a starting point. They seem to be getting mostly bigger (more replication), and the most important thing to consider when growing like that is power distribution.