Tesla Breaks Up With NVIDIA, Announces New Self-Driving Chip

Introduction: Telsla's New Self-Driving Chip

Until today, Tesla was using NVIDIA technology inside countless self-driving Model S and Model X vehicles but today the company announced its own in-house designed processors have been installed into thousands of Model S and Model X vehicles since March.

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Tesla will be putting its new Full Self Driving Chip in the new Model 3 vehicles, something it has been doing for just over a week now. Elon Musk announced the new chip during Tesla's Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California, where he referred to it as "the best chip in the world". The Full Self-Driving Chip measuring in at 260 square millimeters packing 6 billion transistors, and has 21x the performance of what NVIDIA's chip was providing.

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The new chip is designed by Tesla and manufactured on Samsung silicon on the 14nm FinFET node, with the self-driving chip purpose-built to handle everything for self-driving cars including car sensors that can now detect things much further away than current AI processors. Tesla made a point that the new chip isn't over-engineered and that it doesn't need crazy high-end CPU and GPU specs for its specific tasks, so it is built for a sole purpose and excels heavily because of it.

The company will be pumping out the new Full Self Driving Computer boards with two of the chips, which is used for redundancy. You don't want a full self-driving car relying on a single processor and then that processor fails, so the inclusion of a second processor is a pretty crazy thing for Tesla to offer.

Musk explained: "Any part of this could fail, and the car will keep driving. The probability of this computer failing is substantially lower than someone losing consciousness - at least an order of magnitude".

From here, Tesla says that every car it makes will have the hardware it needs for full self-driving, where from now on out Musk says: "All you need to do is improve the software". Full self-driving cars with in-house Tesla-designed chips? Alrighty then.

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Tesla's Full Self Driving Chip Detailed

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Tesla's new chip features dual neural network arrays that are capable of a huge 36 trillion operations per second, each, which is where the 21x faster than NVIDIA's offerings comes into play.

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The GPU on Tesla's new self-driving chip is clocked at 1GHz with 600 GFLOPs of performance.

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The main processor packs 12 x ARM A72 64b CPUs clocked at 2.2GHz.

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Security is important for a self-driving chip with Tesla's security system ensuring that the system "only runs code cryptographically signed by Tesla".

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Better yet, Tesla's new self-driving chip will cost the company just 80% of what it was paying NVIDIA for that massive 21x performance gain, and do it by drawing only a bit more power at 72W, versus NVIDIA's lower 57W.

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The company will be pumping out the new Full Self Driving Computer boards with two of the chips, which is used for redundancy. You don't want a full self-driving car relying on a single processor and then that processor fails, so the inclusion of a second processor is a pretty crazy thing for Tesla to offer.

The Future of Full-Self Driving Cars Is Tesla

The Future Of Self-Driving Vehicles is Tesla

From here on out, Tesla says that every car it makes will have the hardware it needs for full self-driving, where from now on out Musk says: "All you need to do is improve the software". Full self-driving cars with in-house Tesla-designed chips? Alrighty then. Musk explained: "Any part of this could fail, and the car will keep driving. The probability of this computer failing is substantially lower than someone losing consciousness - at least an order of magnitude".

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Musk has also teased that the next-generation chip development has already begun, with Musk touting that the design on the current Full Self Driving Chip was finished "maybe one and half, two years ago" and are around halfway into the development of its next-gen in-house self-driving processor. The next-gen chip will be 3x better than the current one, and is around two years away.

Tesla explained during the announcement: "Tesla is making significant progress in the development of its autonomous driving software and hardware, including our FSD computer, which is currently in production and which will enable full-self driving via future over-the-air software updates".

Pete Bannon, VP of Autopilot Engineering with Tesla explained the new chip for its Autopilot software was designed with the brains of multiple teams across Tesla's entire business. Bannon explained: "I really love it when a solution is boiled down to its base elements. You have video, computing, and power. It's straightforward and simple".

Musk added that the core of all of this is safety, adding: "Any part of this could fail and the car will keep driving. The probability of this computer failing is substantially lower than someone losing consciousness".