Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[larmor]

The Nvidia HW 2.5 computing platform.

144 Trillions operations per sec vs. 21 (nvidia)
2300 frames per second

 

[Drumheller]

This is quite fascinating, but is there anyone here actually understand it?

I'm nowhere near the level of the team working at Tesla. However, I do have a small amount of hardware / design background, and over 20 years of software design / programming / launch / support / etc experience.

In summary: the chip is a very impressive design. The team did a fantastic job in balancing performance / heat production / energy usage / memory management / security. Power vs heat is a trade-off. They pulled it off while also gaining more performance (my guess) than they aimed for.

It's impressive. Add as Elon just said, all they need now is software. This hardware is plenty for what they need (my impression, that matches what they are saying).

of course, in software, there is always the unexpected. I am of the opinion that Tesla is doing the right approach to FSD. I think they're farther away than being ready in 2019, but they are in a league of their own (positive) compared to any competitor.

 

[Fact Checking]

Kick-ass chip!

What surprised me is that they created not just a NN accelerator, but integrated it with a full SoC, video processing units and a number of beefy 64-bit ARM cores.

I.e. it's a full replacement for all Nvidia chips AFAICS.

 

[Tslynk67]

SP up to $263.75, it's happening!!!

 

[sweter]

Already halfway through NEXT gen design..

*boggle*

Yea, so my question is what are the obvious improvements? And why, if 3.0 is sufficient ?

 

[thait84]

I'm always impressed with the level of detail that Elon knows. Most CEOs do not get that deep into the weeds.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Elon confident as always.

And vey calm. You beat me to this.

 

[EVMeister]

Yes master Elon. :|

 

[Tslynk67]

Don't mention LIDAR, I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it...

 

[humbaba]

I wish Musk had kept quiet about the power efficiency of a competitor chip. He insisted it had a larger power envelope when it has about half according to what I could find:

NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier, World’s Most Powerful SoC, Brings Dramatic New AI Capabilities | NVIDIA Blog

 

[azaz]

gonna raise the odds of a cap raise to 40%, Elon is focused

 

[ZeApelido]

Hai guyz, do you think Elon likes Lidar?

 

[JRP3]

LIDAR is a fools errand, doomed.

 

[mekberg]

To put this in perspective, I have an Intel 8700k in my gaming rig running at 5 ghz. Its thermal design power (stock) is 95 watts.

The Tesla ASIC is ~72 watts.

Here is is the heatsink I use on my computer, but I believe the Tesla computer is plumbed through the coolant loop.

 

[Alphacrux]

Elon: “anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed”.

 

[RoadsterPlease]

Elon: **** Lidar, you'll see.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Doom on you waymo!

 

[Doggydogworld]

.

I'm impressed by Trip - he actually has some knowledge about neural network and asked very specific questions about whether the chip can support other activation functions like tanh or sigmoid functions.

Me, too. Besides requiring technical knowledge, it's a perceptive question about how hardwired this chip is.

Answer, it's definitely hardwired for image recognition but they've reserved some flexibility to tweak their NN over time.

 

[Mich]

EM body language is not very comfortable.

 

[SteveG3]

“lidar...
a fool’s errand...
doomed...
doomed...
you’ll see”

(-Elon, as if that was not clear already)