Tesla held nothing back at their Autonomous Day claiming they’ve built the best self-driving chip in the world.
“How could it be that Tesla, who have never designed a chip before would design the best chip in the world? That’s objectively what has occurred, not best by a small margin, but best by a huge margin”
They brought Former Apple chip engineer Pete Bannon who designed the “full self-driving computer,” or FSD Computer from the silicon up. The Autopilot Hardware 3.0 features over 144 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of neural network performance, two AI accelerators, a graphics chip, and an image signal processor, all of which translates to a 1.25 improved power consumption and 80 percent reduced cost overall. Moreover, Tesla claims it’s 7 times more powerful than competitor Nvidia’s Drive Xavier chip.
According to Marketwatch Nvidia has spoken out against Tesla’s bold claims:
Tesla was inaccurate in comparing its Full Self Driving computer at 144 TOPS of processing with Nvidia Drive Xavier at 21 TOPS. The correct comparison would have been against Nvidia’s full self-driving computer, Nvidia Drive AGX Pegasus, which delivers 320 TOPS for AI perception, localization and path planning.” The statement also contends that “while Xavier delivers 30 TOPS of processing, Tesla erroneously stated that it delivers 21 TOPS. Moreover, a system with a single Xavier processor is designed for assisted driving AutoPilot features, not full self-driving.
Tesla took a few digs at Nvidia over the course of the press event, the most notable was claiming that their wide portfolio of products meant they were unable to focus on autonomous drive with the same dedication they brought to the table.
It will be interesting to see these two boards go head to head in real-world testing.
Musk also announced plans to launch a Robotaxi network of 1 Millon cars by 2020, you can read all about that over here.
