Tesla’s New AI Chip Isn’t A Silver Bullet For Self-Driving Cars

At Tesla’s Autonomy Day event for investors on Monday, CEO Elon Musk made a characteristically big deal out of the company’s new microchips.

Image result for Tesla logo

Describing the new FSD computer (it stands for “full self-driving”) that will power Tesla’s vehicles, Musk said they contained what was “objectively” the “best chip in the world.” And that’s not best by a little, but “by a huge margin.”

Experts and rivals beg to differ. They say this claim should be taken with a pinch of salt, and that while Tesla’s new hardware is impressive, it doesn’t provide an insurmountable advantage for the company, nor will it solve the challenges facing self-driving cars.

Image result for Tesla logo

“Any company that Elon Musk is affiliated with, they make big claims,” says Patrick Moorhead, a semiconductor analyst and industry veteran. “And sometimes things go through, and the rocket lands on a pedestal in the middle of the ocean, and sometimes … it blows up in mid-air.”

The claims being made about Tesla’s new self-driving chips fit this pattern, says Moorhead. It could be a fantastic coup for the company, but it could also create unnecessary problems. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I’ve never seen a great first chip. “To me, it’s a huge distraction and a waste of money.”

Related image

But Tesla certainly thinks its chips are worth shouting about, giving its new hardware a significant amount of airtime on Monday. Pete Bannon, the company’s lead on the project, opened the event with a detailed rundown of the FSD’s technical specs. Musk was sitting beside him as the hype man, ready to translate technical specs into sound bites and boasts.

“They inaccurately stated the performance as 21 TOPS, or trillion operations per second, and we’re at 30,” says Shapiro. “They cut 30 percent off our actual performance.” Nvidia previously provided the chips for Tesla’s cars, and it still supplies many other companies in the industry.

Related image

Shapiro notes that Tesla also compared its new chips to Nvidia’s older hardware, specifically the company’s Xavier computer, which was unveiled back in 2016. A fairer comparison would be with Nvidia’s new Pegasus computer, says Shapiro, which has a processing speed of 320 TOPS. That’s more than double the output of Tesla’s new FSD hardware, though it comes with a corresponding greater power usage.

This aspect of the presentation was “deceptive,” says Mike Demler, a microprocessor expert and analyst with The Linley Group. “It wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison at all,” he said. “On pure technical grounds, Tesla has built a significant chip. It’s just not the best thing since sliced bread, as Musk claims.”

Image result for Tesla logo

When asked if Nvidia’s hardware could replicate the 2,100 frames-per-second processing speed of the FSD computer, Shapiro said Tesla’s presentation hadn’t offered enough detail to answer that. “I don’t know what that benchmark is, so it’s hard for us to comment on what our performance would be,” he said.

Related image

Shapiro praised Tesla’s work on the FSD, though, and said that, like Nvidia, the company realized that huge amounts of processing power were necessary to make self-driving cars a reality. “The savvy automakers get that, [but] Tesla has a big lead,” says Shapiro. “I drive a Tesla every day, and it’s amazing.”

“There’s a danger in making a chip too specific,” says Demler. “Did they make it flexible enough that, as these new algorithms are developed, they can adapt?”

Image result for Tesla logo

During the event on Monday, Musk presented the integration of its new chips as an important piece in achieving full autonomy. “All cars being produced all have the hardware necessary, computer and otherwise, for full self-driving,” he said. “All you need to do is improve the software.” He added that, by 2020, Tesla would have “over a million” fully autonomous cars on the road.

These claims, combined with Bannon’s detailed and impressive rundown of the FSD’s technical specs, might lead you to think self-driving cars are just around the corner. But it’s worth remembering that Musk said exactly the same thing about Tesla’s cars in 2016.

Image result for Tesla logo

That same year, he promised that a Tesla would drive autonomously from LA to New York by the end of 2017. Three years later, it still hasn’t happened.