
Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars - evo_9
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/tesla-is-building-its-own-ai-chips-for-self-driving-cars/
======
Fricken
Right now, with HW2 Tesla is in kind of an awkward no man's land where their
hardware is overkill for basic ADAS, but nowhere near enough for any kind of
autonomy that allows the driver to turn their attention away from the driving
task.

By going to a custom ASIC with inferencing. I have little doubt about Musk's
claim that it'll offer a 10x improvement over the current stripped down PX
Drive2 variant for deep learning tasks. If I'm to decrypt Musk's branded
terminology and take him at his word, then they'll be going from about 8 TOPS
to 80 TOPs with that they'll be able to get even deeper into the no man's land
that's even more overkill for basic ADAS but still not nearly enough to handle
full self driving safely in all conditions, though maybe they'll get L3
highway out of it.

Nvidia's upcoming Pegasus board will supposedly do 320 TOPS, and their
competitor, Intel/Mobileye's EyeQ5 will likely have comparable specs. These
motherboards are designed to replace Robotaxi trunks brimming with ~$150k in
liquid cooled compute that draw 3-4000 watts.

~~~
haberman
I ordered a Tesla Model 3 yesterday. When I see the "Full Self-Driving
Capability" checkbox at checkout time (it's an option you can pay $3,000 for
right now) I just have zero confidence that they can deliver on this. Almost
every other aspect of the car is fantastic. But Tesla's delusions about
achieving full self-driving with their current approach just make me lose some
respect for them. It makes me worried that they might be deluded about other
things too.

I use the word "deluded" above realizing that I might be completely wrong. If
they pull it off I'll eat crow and give them props. But I just don't see it
happening.

~~~
martythemaniak
This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy
with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be
very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway
driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD.

Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely
strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. They'll go at length about
how LIDAR is a hard requirement, about how many FLOPs you need, etc etc etc.
Fact: FSD doesn't exist and no one has it. Nobody knows which approach will
work and if more than one approach works no one knows the timelines or
economics of the different approaches and very certainly no one knows the
market impact of these. But people start thinking they know the future and
then become very emotionally vested in their make-believe stories.

It's actually quite simple: companies sell you stuff, buy it if you want
it/need it. Today Waymo sells me nothing, Cruise/GM sells me nothing, Tesla
sells me a great BEV with Level 2 driving assistance. I got the car, but not
the level 2 because it doesn't fit my driving needs. If they start selling
level 3-4-5, I'll buy it if the price is right and I need it.

~~~
ericpauley
Waymo is very close to wide availability of self driving hire cars in Phoenix:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-
th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-the-life-of-
waymo-s-driverless-test-family)

~~~
martythemaniak
Yes, various companies are in varying states of readiness in various
jurisdictions.

~~~
ericpauley
> Today Waymo sells me nothing

It's certainly not nothing

------
mholt
We knew this almost a year ago [1]. Tesla held a panel discussion during NIPS
2017 in Long Beach where Elon Musk, Andrej Karpathy, and Jim Keller talked
about AI. (I was at the event.) Jim and Elon talked briefly about how their
hardware will overcome the limitations of current GPUs by making the bus
massively parallel, along with other interesting tid-bits.

Here's the direct link to my notes from the event:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7iczp7/elon_mu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7iczp7/elon_musk_confirms_that_tesla_is_building_its_own/dqxylsa/)

[1]:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/08/elon_musk_finally_a...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/08/elon_musk_finally_admits_tesla_is_building_its_own_custom_ai_chips/)

------
titzer
This is pretty bad from a hardware/software verification perspective. People
who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It's amazing that we're
gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go
>100mph, it doesn't matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a
_weapon_.

~~~
ben174
It only has to perform better than a human.

~~~
titzer
Humans are not remotely programmable.

~~~
IMTDb
Ever heard of the concept of "propaganda" ?

~~~
mhh__
There is obviously a difference between hacking a single vehicle and (say)
convincing a generation of youth to die for a cause.

Also, while I agree that you can "program" a human, you can't program them to
jump up and down and touch their toes (so to speak)

------
twtw
The most interesting question about this is what their motivation was to
justify building an in-house ASIC design team. That isn't a super hard thing
to do for a company of Tesla's size, but it is nontrivial and seems like a
significant investment. It is probable that they got massive performance
improvements by specializing their hardware, but it isn't clear that they
couldn't have gotten the same perf improvement by upgrading to the next gen
nvidia system (drive Xavier or something like that, the one with Volta +
NVDLA).

~~~
mrfredward
It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take
on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency.

If they succeed, it means slightly improved efficiency and cutting NVidia's
profit margin out of their cost structure. If they fail, it would cost
billions, and obscure chip bugs could put lives at risk. That risk/reward
doesn't seem worth it unless you really know what you're doing and are
confident you will succeed.

Of course, it fuels the hype machine in the short term.

~~~
WhompingWindows
"It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take
on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency."

This seems like the biography of Elon Musk's companies. He gets a crazy hard
problem that people say he and his companies can not do, then he tries to
implement it, often falling well behind and well short of the goalposts due to
lack of foresight and overambitious scheduling. There were naysayers the whole
way, including just as loud as there are now if not louder, and yet his
companies' achievements and networth continue to climb.

~~~
gamblor956
What crazy hard problems have his companies solved?

Spaceflight was solved decades before Elon was born. Reusable rockets weren't
a hard problem--they were simply a problem the incumbents were unwilling to
address because it would have massively cut into their revenues and profits.

Electric cars actually predated ICE cars. The issue with EVs was always the
charging infrastructure, which Tesla solved...by simply throwing a lot of
money at it. (Not hard, just resource intensive.) Their batteries are built by
Panasonic.

Boring Co literally is just a used tunneling machine. They have literally not
done anything with it except test it out below the SpaceX parking lot (and the
innovation in boring would come not from the tunneling but with the post-
tunneling construction of the tunnel walls, stations, dirt removal, and
ultimate extraction of the boring machine).

Even at Paypal, their biggest innovation was developed by Musk's biggest pre-
Paypal competitor (Thiel's company) before they merged to form PayPal.

~~~
_louisr_

      Reusable rockets weren't a hard problem
    

Armchair engineer over here

~~~
gamblor956
I'm willing to back up my statements with my existing login, and I don't need
to be an engineer to read the history of resuable launch systems. They've been
around since the 1960s, and space-capable launch systems were a thing in the
1980s. They were killed the first time around by the collapse of the USSR, and
then again when the Iridium went bankrupt, eliminating the demand.

~~~
_louisr_
You have nothing to back up the statement that "reusable rockets are not a
hard problem", and let me back up this claim of mine by pointing out that only
partial reusability exists today. In addition I invite you to build reusable
rocket systems, sir, since you have already claimed that the problem is
"easy". You could make some good money solving that problem, and you would
once and for all put this argument to bed.

------
gallerdude
The benefit they point out is 200fps vs. 2000fps, but is that actually that
useful? In the post of OpenAO's robot, they said that improving the response
times gave no significant gains.

Only thing I can imagine would be allowances for wider and deeper neural nets.

~~~
pasta
Let's say you drive 130km/h (36m/s).

36 / 200 frames = 18cm travel distance between each calculation.

So you either can calculate much more each 18cm or calculate shorter
distances.

I think a shorter distance is not very useful but calculating more might be.

~~~
baybal2
One thing high FPS are good for are optical flow mappers. Think of estimating
relative motion of things in video.

------
vl
_As for how they’ll get the chips into existing Teslas, Elon says: “We made it
easy to switch out the computer, and that’s all that needs to be done. You
take out one computer, and plug in the next. All the connectors are
compatible.”_

I'll believe it when they successfully install it to the previous gen car.
More often than not it turns out that some other hardware is incompatible with
software improvements or has bugs and full system is not functional anyway
without full upgrade.

~~~
LastZactionHero
Really working or not, I'm just happy that an upgrade path crossed their
minds. My car is 6 years old, and the console/nav looks so dated I wish they'd
just put in dials.

------
tntn
> By having its own silicone

Will this mistake never go away?

~~~
Ultimatt
Only when everyone learns a major property of fake breasts isn't that they
solve computational problems via the field effect.

~~~
oliveshell
...and that semiconductor wafers don’t provide a flexible watertight seal
around windows, even if you crush them up and squirt them from a tube.

------
nikofeyn
what does he mean with regards to GPUs and CPUs "emulating"? they are
computation machines doing computations. an algorithm running on one or the
other isn't emulating anything in this context. running on "bare metal" is
just an optimization along a certain axis. it isn't any more real of a
computation.

and talking about this now seems like another desperate attempt at generating
hype.

~~~
tokipin
As a naive example, if in a CPU you are doing some specific 3-step algorithm
which would normally require 3 clock cycles, you can instead bake that
algorithm into a circuit along with the memory it needs that will run in 1
cycle. In Elon's terminology, the CPU has to "emulate" what the baked-in
circuit simply is.

But from the sounds of it this chip goes beyond that. It sounds like some kind
of RAM/GPU hybrid with matrix-specific instructions specifically targeting NN
inference for Tesla's specific style of NNs, which as a first guess I take to
mean "lots and lots of layers."

In the call they mentioned increasing their investment in the chip team and
technology, which is a sign that they're confident it's going to pay off.

~~~
nikofeyn
what i was getting at that the term "emulation" is rarely used, at least from
my experience, in this context except in cases where something is truly faking
it like game emulation, OS emulation, hardware emulation, etc. i personally
feel like musk is using this term as a marketing and hype technique, that all
of the sudden CPUs and GPUs are "faking it" for these applications.

------
squarefoot
Curiously there already is (was?) a probably eastern European chip
manufacturer named Tesla (search images for "tesla ttl chips") but I wasn't
able to find info on the manufacturer and if they're still in business.

~~~
r3bl
You're thinking of this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(Czechoslovak_company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_\(Czechoslovak_company\))

It's not a unique name in any shape or form. There's a smartphone
"manufacturer" from Serbia that uses Tesla as its brand name:
[https://tesla.info/en/](https://tesla.info/en/)

------
fuddle
It's pretty interesting that there a only 2 comments on TechCrunch website,
yet nearly 200 comments on HN. :)

------
melling
“Nvidia’s hardware was handling about 200 frames per second, its specialized
chip is able to do crunch out 2000 frames per second “with full redundancy and
failover”.”

What are the real-world benefits going from 200 to 2000 frames a second? 200
seems quite fast.

~~~
Theodores
Nothing seems that fast at 50 m.p.h., however, excuse the mix in units, but
each of those 200 frames is the equivalent of 10cm or so along the road. At
2000 frames per second then that is the equivalent of 1cm.

I don't make a habit of crashing cars but I did have one glancing head on
crash, combined speeds around 125 m.p.h. and it was only centimetres that
meant I did not wipe out that family and trash the car I was in.

As a consequence I would say that this 10x frame rate really is quite game
changing, particularly for on-coming vehicles.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Can future gen GPUs bridge the gap? The NVIDIA CEO seemed really confident
when asked previously about the challenge that specialized AI chips posed. Is
his confidence misplaced/just bluster or what?

~~~
twtw
Probably current gen GPUs can bridge the gap. The nvidia platform after Drive
PX 2 (which is what Tesla ships) uses Volta (with "tensor cores" to speed up
fp16) and has a deep learning accelerator
([http://nvdla.org](http://nvdla.org)) for inference (i think both int8 and
fp16).

------
nickik
I would love to know if they are building on RISC-V. That would give them nice
integration and no additional cost.

------
coob
So much for no new hardware required for L5

~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
Just wait until they admit that they need LIDAR too... Cha Ching! Various
Autopilot accidents strongly imply that whatever the computer “brain” is doing
doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have sufficient “eyes” to actually see things
like a fire truck, cop car, or bollard.

~~~
ethbro
And yet squishy meatbags manage to sensor fuse a stereoscopic image (plus
nascient sound based imaging) into a reliably rendered picture of the world...

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, and they do that with dozens of years of accumulated knowledge. Do not
have the impression that what you perceive with your eyes is the photons
hitting your retina. All that input is heavily fused with decades of
experience in dealing with people and the world.

~~~
ethbro
Where I'm from, small humans typically locomote with around 6-10 months of
life experience. And fairly reliably. YMMV

~~~
TeMPOraL
Would you be fine with letting a 10 months old walk around town unsupervised?
Or drive a car?

~~~
ethbro
If I trained a child to drive, I'd be comfortable letting them drive at 6. I
believe I was around that age the first time I drove (handling steering, with
assistance on gas / brake). My memory is that the only difficult part was a
lack of power steering on hilly terrain.

Same age for walking around town unsupervised: the Japanese do and don't seem
to lose many.

My original point was focused on the technical feasibility of driving with
limited sensor input, which is physically possible.

Whether or not it takes a week, a month, or a million experience-years is a
computational and algorithm problem.

All of which (based on previous technological progression) appear to be
tractable.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And my point is that it's not just about experience-years, it's also about the
breadth of knowledge. When driving, humans do not use just the experience
acquired from looking at things from behind the wheel. They also use their
general understanding of physics, of materials, of concepts related to
visibility, traction, not to mention expected behaviour of other people and
how to read face expressions.

~~~
ethbro
For an average driver, I'd call BS on that. Humans are _terrible_ at learning
complicated things they rarely have to recall.

E.g. the disaster that is the first major snowfall, every year, or automatic
transmissions, antilock brakes, and traction control systems becoming standard

The human can only reliably be trusted to keep the car between the lines, stop
appropriately, and occasionally make turns. Which is something much simpler to
compete with!

------
slivym
>By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own
pace. If they suddenly recognize something the hardware is lacking, they’re
not waiting on someone else to build it. It’s by no means a trivial task — but
if they can pull it off without breaking the bank (and Elon says it costs them
“the same as the current hardware”), it could end up being a significant
strength.

I outright snorted at this. Time to market is not why you build a custom chip
instead of software. Is this article written by a complete bonehead?

Tesla has it's own hardware platform. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know
that was always going to happen because of power consumption, cost and
performance. The Nvidia Drive platform is designed to be a quick way to get to
market with FuSa. The requirements for fully autonomous modes are estimated by
some to be over 10x higher than the top CPU/GPU offerings.

~~~
antris
>Tesla has it's own hardware platform. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know
that was always going to happen because of power consumption, cost and
performance

... so that they can create performance-intensive features that nobody else in
the market yet has, because the off-the-shelf hardware won't allow it. Due to
power consumption, cost and performance issues. And this custom hardware is
being developed to solve them.

You're basically saying the same thing in different words. I mean, what else
do you do with better power consumption, cost and performance other than new,
better-working features? You think Tesla will sell cars to the mass market
with impressive computer specs?

Apple's own custom hardware has enabled it to experiment with performance-
intensive features unlike other smartphone manufacturers, Tesla is going for
the same strategy.

~~~
cma
Other people are going to be using inferencing chips soon too. Tesla might
even just be basing it all on NVDLA (Nvidia's open source inferencing hardware
targeted at self driving) and calling it their own.

~~~
antris
Of course the competitors will follow. But Tesla will probably be first and a
step ahead in the future, hence the talk about go-to-market speed.

~~~
cma
Waymo has possibly already been using it for years as Google pioneered that
type of chip.

