Musk confirms that Tesla is working on its own new AI chip led by Jim Keller

[Morgen]

[QUOTE]There have been rumors that Tesla is developing its own chip optimized for self-driving applications ever since we reported on the automaker quietly hiring legendary chip architect Jim Keller from AMD last year.

Now CEO Elon Musk finally confirmed the rumor – specifying that Tesla is working on its own new AI chip and that the effort is led by Keller.
At the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) yesterday, Musk held a fireside chat with Tesla’s new Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, Andrej Karpathy, Jim Keller, Tesla’s Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering, and Shivon Zilis, a partner at Bloomberg Beta and a project director for Musk’s office.
...
But Musk also made a few interesting comments, including a confirmation that Tesla is working on its own AI chip to enable self-driving technology.

The CEO confirmed that Keller is behind the effort, which he believes will result in “the best custom AI hardware in the world.”

Keller has an important reputation in the hardware world after having been a key player in the creation of several architectures, like Athlon K7 and K8 at AMD, before developing Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, which powered most of Apple’s mobile devices from 2010 to 2012. He later came back to AMD and led the design of the company’s latest chip architecture.
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[url]https://electrek.co/2017/12/08/elon-musk-tesla-new-ai-chip-jim-keller/[/url]

[Harbie]

At this point I'll believe Musk's promises about Tesla, especially with regards to autopilot, when results are actually produced. His work at SpaceX is pretty awesome though.

Any word if this is a machine learning ASIC? Sounds like an ASIC based off Keller's involvement.

[nintenman1]

[QUOTE=Harbie;52959990]At this point I'll believe Musk's promises about Tesla, especially with regards to autopilot, when results are actually produced. His work at SpaceX is pretty awesome though.

Any word if this is a machine learning ASIC? Sounds like an ASIC based off Keller's involvement.[/QUOTE]

well... probably an asic designed around the idea of matrix multiplication accelerators, which is pretty much what all of deep learning and AI as we know it are built around. The NVidia Tesla cards have dedicated "Tensor cores" which basically handle 4x4 INT matrices, google, apples and others' designs are similar if on a smaller scale.

The main question I would be asking here is if it really makes sense for them to be pouring all of this money into an area they have zero prior experience in when they still aren't really on firm footing when it comes to the main manufacturing side of their business. They certainly aren't going to be able to out-Nvidia Nvidia, They just don't have the money or the prior experience.

[Harbie]

[QUOTE=nintenman1;52960197]well... probably an asic designed around the idea of matrix multiplication accelerators, which is pretty much what all of deep learning and AI as we know it are built around. The NVidia Tesla cards have dedicated "Tensor cores" which basically handle 4x4 INT matrices, google, apples and others' designs are similar if on a smaller scale.

The main question I would be asking here is if it really makes sense for them to be pouring all of this money into an area they have zero prior experience in when they still aren't really on firm footing when it comes to the main manufacturing side of their business. They certainly aren't going to be able to out-Nvidia Nvidia, They just don't have the money or the prior experience.[/QUOTE]

Yeah. No clue why they aren't using some existing ML platform/chip.

[Morgen]

[QUOTE=nintenman1;52960197]well... probably an asic designed around the idea of matrix multiplication accelerators, which is pretty much what all of deep learning and AI as we know it are built around. The NVidia Tesla cards have dedicated "Tensor cores" which basically handle 4x4 INT matrices, google, apples and others' designs are similar if on a smaller scale.

The main question I would be asking here is if it really makes sense for them to be pouring all of this money into an area they have zero prior experience in when they still aren't really on firm footing when it comes to the main manufacturing side of their business. They certainly aren't going to be able to out-Nvidia Nvidia, They just don't have the money or the prior experience.[/QUOTE]

Once Model 3 production gets going then they should have a substantial amount of cash, and Musk isn't exactly known for just keeping money sitting around. His companies tend to reinvest large amounts of it into R&D, though he might have to slow it down a bit in the next couple of years.

It sounds like Keller brought a good chunk of the people from AMD over as well.