I have not said the engineering work is automatic. It is not too far from the area that I work in, and I am up to date in the subject. The performance gains for this generation of cards are in line with the existing trend, they are not particularly exciting in that they rise above that trend. This is unrelated to the issue of whether or not the architectural work is hard, and it is somewhat sad that the difference between these two points has to be explicitly stated.
The inline results of this generation do diverge from the over the top marketing from Nvidia in the past year about the 10x increase in performance that would be delivered, largely due to the upgrade to HBM. It is certainly probably that had they delivered on HBM we would be seeing a rare jump in performance above the trend, but clearly this has not happened. It seems unlike to arrive on the 1080-ti after not making an appearance on the Titan and so we will need to wait another generation to see what difference that actually makes.
If it's not too far from the area you work in you should be more understanding of the engineering challenges here.
We can't clock these things faster like we used to in the days of 6Mhz CPUs. We can't shrink feature size since 10nm is proving to be a difficult node to crack. We can't jam more features onto the die since we're already producing some of the largest possible dies.
The easy gains are gone. Now we're stuck dealing with the hard stuff. Gains will be slower.
As I said above: there are two separate issues. Whether or not it is hard to deliver the same (relative) improvement in each generation. Whether or not Nvidia have delivered an improvement in line with their normal trend, or whether they have exceeded it.
These are not the same thing. As I said: I am well aware of the engineering challenges at this scale. You are trying to argue that it is hard: so what? Should Nvidia get a badge for "trying hard". It still doesn't change the fact that what they have achieved in this generation is the same (relative) improvement as previous generations. This is not what they were selling in the run-up to the 1080 launch when they were still claiming 10x improvements due to the new memory subsystem.
They did not do what they said that they would. This is quite a simple fact - why do you try to argue that what they have done is hard. The difficulty is irrelevant. Do you think that an evaluation of the performance that they achieved should include how hard they worked on it?
They fit 12 billion transistors on their latest die, that's even more than a top-end Xeon. You can bitch all day from your comfortable arm chair, but they're leading the industry in counts and that alone can't be easy. They're not silk screening t-shirts here, they're pushing their process to the limits.
If they were falling behind in transistor counts you might have a case, but they're not.
So again you are arguing that they are trying really hard. What does that have to do with whether or not this generation is above the trend-line or not?
I'm arguing they're at the top of their game and they're up against a wall that is not easy to move.
It doesn't really matter if it's above or below the trend line. Maybe the trend line is bullshit now because all the things driving it were the easy gains we've exhausted.
The inline results of this generation do diverge from the over the top marketing from Nvidia in the past year about the 10x increase in performance that would be delivered, largely due to the upgrade to HBM. It is certainly probably that had they delivered on HBM we would be seeing a rare jump in performance above the trend, but clearly this has not happened. It seems unlike to arrive on the 1080-ti after not making an appearance on the Titan and so we will need to wait another generation to see what difference that actually makes.