
Elon Musk Claims on Tesla Chips Don't Match the Reality - chollida1
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/musk-s-chipmaking-boasts-clash-with-autonomous-car-reality
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BluSyn
Bloomberg is spinning nvidia's own blog post.

Read the source: [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-
driving/](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-driving/)

Then read the Bloomberg article again, and tell me how that isn't complete
spin towards a narrative that doesn't exist in the source.

Bloomberg is completely shameless in their anti-anything-Tesla narrative.

~~~
danso
The blog post literally calls out Musk for inaccuracies:

> _But while we agree with him on the big picture—that this is a challenge
> that can only be tackled with supercomputer-class systems—there are a few
> inaccuracies in Tesla’s Autonomy Day presentation that we need to correct._

Ask yourself why nVidia would feel the need to put out anything given that
they and Tesla are no longer collaborators. Do you believe they’d put out a
“Cool claims by Tesla” press release if they didn’t feel the need to point out
corrections?

~~~
forgottenpass
>Ask yourself why nVidia would feel the need to put out anything given that
they and Tesla are no longer collaborators.

nVidia must be short-selling Tesla stock. If Hacker News has taught me
anything, it's that we can rest assured about our TSLA investments because the
only reason anyone ever says something negative about - or disagrees with -
Musk or Tesla is that they're short sellers and we've just gotta ride it out.

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notimetorelax
I don't see much substance in the article. E.g. Nvidia argues that they have
chips to meet Tesla's specs, I don't know what constraints Tesla had, but they
did mention one - power consumption:

Drive PX Xavier - 30 TOPS - 30 Watts -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Drive#Drive_PX_Xavier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Drive#Drive_PX_Xavier)
DRIVE AGX Pegasus - 320 TOPS - 500 Watts -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Drive#Drive_PX_Pegasus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Drive#Drive_PX_Pegasus)

Both chips if scaled to 144 TOPS consume double the power of Tesla's solution.

~~~
timdorr
They said during the presentation they had a 100W limit. The previous Nvidia
hardware is ~50W and this new hardware is ~72W (36W per chip).

So, 500W is going to be well beyond that and wouldn't fit their requirements.

~~~
sundvor
I'm watching the video. Highly interesting.

That level of power use would take *noticeable" dents into the range of the
car, especially in inner city driving.

Furthermore that's a lot of thermals to get rid of. 500w, crikey, speaking as
someone who water cools his PCs, forget about retrofitting older cars! (That
was one of the criteria!)

The existing units sit behind the glove box in front of the firewall, and are
rather compact. The thermal budget was a hard one.

Nvidia are full of crap on this one.

~~~
7e
Practically speaking there is no power limit. The traction motors on Tesla's
cars themselves will pull two orders of magnitude more power than these chips
will. Thermals are nothing compared to the heat generated by the battery,
especially when supercharging.

~~~
sundvor
All power usage adds up. More important, the unit sits behind the glove box in
front of the firewall. You'd need to redesign the car to fit a cooler worthy
of 500w in there, thus making retrofitting a much harder task. My 280mm
Corsair AIO water cooler struggles with a 140W TDP Intel CPU at full load.

All typical car manufacturers' message when rolling out something new: Buy the
new car. Here, existing owners get access to a paradigm shifting feature, by
just swapping out what will be an inexpensive module.

Tesla has nailed this upgrade, in my eyes. I don't own any of their cars
(although I wish I did), nor do I have any shares.

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sweden
Sensationalist headline, the entire article based on the statements from
Nvidia on this blog post: \- [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-
self-driving/](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-driving/)

I'm not defending Tesla's statements on the comparison between Tesla's
hardware and Nvidia's hardware, but it feels that the author of the article
took an advantage of Nvidia's post to dismiss Tesla's progress on this area.

------
zaroth
“The new 14nm based self-developed chip is fabbed by Samsung and is capable of
144 tera operations per second (TOPS) (two chips each 72 TOPS) compared with
Nvidia’s Drive Xavier’s theoretical performance of 21 TOPS. It features two
fully independent packages, each with their own with DRAM memory, flash
storage chips, and power supplies. If one fails, the failsafe is the second
one.” [1]

So the correct way to look at this is that Tesla has a redundant 72 TOPS chip
compared to nVidia Xavier 21 or 30 TOPS.

It’s nonsensical to compare a stack of chips versus another. NVidia claiming
the fair comparison is a 320 TOPS system with 2 Xavier’s and 2 TensorCores
pulling 500 watts total. A single Xavier provides 30 TOPS of Int8 at 30 watts.

The redundant Tesla setup by comparison pulls 100 watts total. [2]

A fact check that just parrots Nvidia’s blog with no actual research or fair
presentation of the numbers may be par for the course but not terribly useful.

[1] - [https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/tesla-develops-own-self-
dr...](https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/tesla-develops-own-self-driving-ai-
chip-removes-nvidia.html)

[2] - [https://electrek.co/2019/04/23/nvidia-disputes-tesla-fsd-
com...](https://electrek.co/2019/04/23/nvidia-disputes-tesla-fsd-computer/)

~~~
cptskippy
> The redundant Tesla setup by comparison pulls 100 watts total. [2]

Hmm... I recalled him saying 72w in the presentation compared to 54w in the
previous hardware. Then he said this was within the allotted power envelope
and wouldn't impact range.

~~~
zaroth
I didn’t watch the whole livestream, but it could be one talking about just
the specific chips versus the other the whole system?

~~~
cptskippy
Yes, and they said the whole system was spec'd at under 200w in the Model 3.

I went back and it was around the 1hr 30min mark when they had the chip
designer on stage answering questions.

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breatheoften
It’s a chip for doing exactly the convolutions they want to do a whole lot of
... Nvidia gpus present a very different and more flexible programming model —
why is it not the expected case that Tesla’s hardware would have the price and
wattage advantage for the problem they intend to throw at it ...?

~~~
kingosticks
Do they have the scale to achieve any sort of price advantage? 14nm NRE costs
are huge.

~~~
zaroth
Samsung fabs it. Do you mean chip design and tape out NRE?

Tesla spent several years designing their current chip, finishing about 1.5
years ago. They hired a industry guru to help them do it, I’m sure the
financial investment was massive. Elon stated somewhat wryly “their entire
expense sheet is FSD” which is to say their R&D spending in FSD dwarfs their
other R&D spending.

They are also already working on a Gen2 of their just released chip for the
last year plus.

For Tesla the hardware design is essential to achieving their goal. If they
get FSD in the real world before everyone else, they can print money with the
Tesla Network. And they simply can’t get there first using general purpose off
the shelf hardware.

It’s a core part of the competitive advantage of the Tesla fleet. The fact
that you can slot this new hardware into any AP2.5+ car shipped in the last
couple years is an amazing perk of owning a Tesla. No other carmaker comes
close to offering this kind of long-term support with software and _hardware_
updates to a late-model-year car.

~~~
madengr
I assume it will be a free upgrade to those who paid for the self-driving
hardware?

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zamalek
This piece is pretty ludicrous, right off the bat:

> [Video] How can a company that has never designed a chip, design the best
> chip in the world?

They hire one of the best chip design teams in the world. Musk said this no
fewer than two times during the presentation.

~~~
bdamm
Right, much of the actual hard work in chip design would be outsourced. They
pull in enormous amounts of templated chip design ("IP"), and clearly hired
top talent to keep the whole thing going. They'd need simulators and labs for
testing, but maybe outsource PCB layout. And I believe Elon even stated out
loud that the fab itself is in Texas. Nobody makes chips on their own except
perhaps Intel or Samsung. Even with all that industry support it's still a
remarkable piece of work in a tight time line, but given the funding and the
people, entirely reasonable.

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manicdee
Apples to oranges comparison. Of course nVidia are going to claim their GPU
processes stuff faster, and ignore the part where you have to get the results
of the calculations off the GPU.

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debatem1
I'd love to see a real comparison of the two technologies under the Tesla
workload, both for what it would say about the chips and what it would say
about the workload.

Having said that, an investor call isn't going to be that and Elon isn't the
person to give it, so I'm not sure what Bloomberg (or Nvidia) wanted here.
"CEO likes own technology" isn't exactly news.

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aiyodev
Where is that committee of independent directors that the SEC required to
control Elon Musk's communications? Is Tesla just ignoring the settlement?

