Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Tesla Raises the Bar for Self-Driving Carmakers

In unveiling the specs of his new self-driving car computer at this week’s Tesla Autonomy Day investor event, Elon Musk made several things very clear to the world. First, Tesla is raising the bar for all other carmakers.

Second, Tesla’s self-driving cars will be powered by a computer based on two of its new AI chips, each equipped with a CPU, GPU, and deep-learning accelerators. The computer delivers 144 trillion operations per second (TOPS), enabling it to collect data from a range of surround cameras, radars and ultrasonics and power deep neural network algorithms.

Third, Tesla is working on a next-generation chip, which says 144 TOPS isn’t enough. At NVIDIA, we have long believed in the vision Tesla reiterated: self-driving cars require computers with extraordinary capabilities.