TESLA DEVELOPING AI CHIPS FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS

TESLA is working with AMD to make a new chip. In view of this, Tesla has over 50 employees involved including chip architect star, Jim Keller.

Tesla Inc formerly named Tesla Motors, is an American automaker, Energy storage company and Solar panel manufacturer based in Palo Alto, California. Was founded in 2003 and it specializes in electric cars. (Source: Wikipedia)

Intel, top renowned chip manufacturer, this time, isn't a part of Tesla's initiative to having AI chips for handling autonomous driving tasks in it's cars. Tesla Co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, promised this year that that capability will be available to consumers in 2019.

Chip architect star, Jim Keller, has Tesla's silicon project under his leadership. He is the well know designer of iPhone A4 and A5 chips. Several AMD veterans including Director Ganesh Venkataramanan, Principal hardware engineer Bill McGee and system circuit design lead Dan Bailey are a part of this initiative.

The current Tesla vehicles use Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) as part of the Autopilot self-driving hardware. This is not to mean that Nvidia chips are less productive, but this is as a result of Nvidia GPUs being capable of doing many things although it's needed to do a few things. In short, a custom chip is made to carry out the simple task of handling autonomous driving.

The integration of AI chips into devices ensures greater margins of productivity just as much as witnessed with the iPhone X with its incorporated AI chip. Microsoft is working on its own AI chip for the Hololen.

Article sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/09/20/tesla-building-an-ai-chip-for-its-cars-with-amd-globalfoundries.html
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Next article to come: Putin says: "The nation that leads in AI will be ruler of the world".