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Tesla Is Building Its Own AI Chips For Self-Driving Cars (techcrunch.com)
Yesterday, during his quarterly earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a new piece of hardware that the company is working on to perform all the calculations required to advance the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles. The specialized chip, known as "Hardware 3," will be "swapped into the Model S, X, and 3," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Tesla has thus far relied on Nvidia's Drive platform. So why switch now? By building things in-house, Tesla say it's able to focus on its own needs for the sake of efficiency. "We had the benefit [...] of knowing what our neural networks look like, and what they'll look like in the future," said Pete Bannon, director of the Hardware 3 project. Bannon also noted that the hardware upgrade should start rolling out next year. "The key," adds Elon "is to be able to run the neural network at a fundamental, bare metal level. You have to do these calculations in the circuit itself, not in some sort of emulation mode, which is how a GPU or CPU would operate. You want to do a massive amount of [calculations] with the memory right there." The final outcome, according to Elon, is pretty dramatic: He says that whereas Tesla's computer vision software running on Nvidia's hardware was handling about 200 frames per second, its specialized chip is able to crunch out 2,000 frames per second "with full redundancy and failover." Plus, as AI analyst James Wang points out, it gives Tesla more control over its own future.
"We had the benefit [...] of knowing what our neural networks look like, and what they'll look like in the future,"
Really? If they take their neural network development seriously I don't think they know what their networks will look like in ten years. It's a research area in the middle of a transformation. Using architectures molded into hardware is probably just costly and will act as an antagonist to innovation. I don't think having 2000 vs 200 frames per second right now outweighs that downside.
Every NN is proprietary, and that is where the functionality to worry about is at. The performance on "edge cases" in driving is directly related to how much compute power you can throw at it. Tesla is multiplying its compute power. The edge cases will improve. Staying with the general purpose GPU instead of true NN hardware will guarantee continued unhandled edge cases.
This HW is undoubtedly also more energy efficient. That is the real key. They could stack on more boards, but these units are already consuming a significant amount of the vehicle's energy. The trick is to get more compute power with the same or less energy. NN specific HW is going to be a requirement to have that happen.
Everyone in the industry has known that GPUs will not be used past the first generation or so. They are development HW. Someone will eventually come up with a general purpose NPU that will win the market, but it hasn't happened yet - mostly because NN implementations haven't settled.
I bet that this allows them to have more cameras. 2000 fps for one camera could be 250fps for 8 cameras. it could also be used for much higher resolution cameras that have fisheye or insect like lenses.
Greed is the root of all evil.
It was either going to be "Elon's folly: why his chips wont work and he will become homeless trying to make them", or "Elon Musk set to disrupt the modern world as we know it with new Super-Computer on a chip stroke of genius".
What I can say is, the reason Tesla will be the biggest innovator and market leader in their field is simple. People are passionate about it. Good or bad, everyone has a strong opinion. Tesla these days reminds me of the "Pray" cover WiReD published about Apple before the second coming of Steve Jobs. Like apple, they were innovating even while close to bankrupt, making moves to right the company, and making strategic acquisitions and bold moves no one else had done before. Remember the first iMac? Remember the "only 4 products" pitch? Everyone felt very passionate about Apple. You either loved or hated them. Why? Because they really did do things differently (pardon the cliche).
Whatever you say about Apple, they are the dominant market leader in terms of profitability, defining standards, and defining what it means to be in technology. They are the "me" to everyone else's "me too". If you want to know how smart phones work, or what features they will have, look to Apple (or Apple rumors).
Tesla will eventually be that for cars. Everyone will move closer to their aesthetic to gain from the aerodynamics they have figured out. Everyone will move to their sales model (no middle-men dealerships). Everyone will move to their large touchscreen interface. Everyone will move to their feature/functionality set. They are going to be the innovators. Why? Because everyone talks about them. When was the last time there was a story on here about Ford's software, or the latest F150 designs. Ford and the like are the Nokia phones of the previous decade. Mercedes is Blackberry. Watch another industry become reinvented in the next 10 years.
Tesla has invented the fpga?
This is not an FPGA. It is a matrix math engine, like Google's TPU.
They do not own a fab
Other than Intel, nobody owns their own fabs anymore.
You just code up your chip in Verilog, debug in a simulator, and upload it to TSMC.
or have the cpu designers that Intel, amd and invidea have.
Neither did Google, but their TPU is a big success.