Author: Patrick Moorhead / Source: Forbes
Earlier this week, on Tesla’s earnings call, Tesla’s Elon Musk “outed” what had been previously rumored — that the company is working on its custom, self-driving car chips. Custom silicon has been the rage as of late, as we have seen Apple, Google and Facebook jump into the deep end.
While only Apple has proven any of this makes sense given risk and investment, it appears Telsa is also going to test the model. But unlike Apple, Google and Facebook, messing up a chip doesn’t endanger anyone’s lives or put the company at risk.Elon and chip designer Peter Bannon made some very interesting statements on performance and efficiency, but without a lot of details. One of the most interesting things said was that the new chips have 10X the performance of “other chips.” If, like Google, Tesla is comparing this to the older Nvidia platform, in this case, Drive PX2 which is three years old, this is less impressive. Teardowns have shown that Tesla only built Autopilot V2 using half the chips on a Drive PX 2.
Tesla’s claims this week aren’t very impressive as Nvidia’s next-generation solution, Drive Xavier, is more than 10X the performance of the prior design SoC, and its Drive Pegasus delivers another order of magnitude of performance — a whopping 320 trillion operations per second. This could mean Tesla is taking a very big risk for very little, if any, gain.
Another provocative statement made was on SoC to GPU performance. Musk said, “the transfer between the GPU and the CPU ends up being one of the constraints on the system.” This is exactly what Nvidia is doing with NVLink, which pumps data at 20 GBps between the two processors. Again, as Tesla didn’t release any detailed information, it’s hard to make a direct comparison. Without those details, like Google’s TPU, it appears Tesla designed its silicon without knowing what Nvidia was designing.
I have to assume that Tesla’s new chip is similar to Google’s TPU, that it’s an ASIC, meaning it is not hardware programmable like an FPGA nor flexible like…
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