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Comment by cowsandmilk | Hacker News Reader

He was very complimentary of the circuit boards, saying he has no idea where they were sourced and basically saying they were the only company using cutting edge circuitry of a quality and density similar to the latest cell phones.

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Tesla's former VP of Autopilot Software&Hardware (oversees all low-voltage hardware, aka everything else besides High Voltage battery drivetrain) was Jim Keller[1][2], who also designed Apple's System on a Chip A4 mobile processor and an early AMD chip architect. So that makes a lot of sense.

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/04/25/tesla-autopilot-jim-keller-le...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

Jim Keller didn't have anything to do with developing the hardware for hw2. The board is from Nvidia, it's a stripped down variant of their Drive PX2 computers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_PX-series#Drive_PX_2

No. That board uses a reference design from Nvidia. They redesigned Nvidia reference designed removed one of the fpgas, changed interfaces added GPS directly on board. If you are not familiar a reference design would be selling your prebuilt computer and telling you this works. Afterwards you come in throw the case out and change anything but try to maintain the relevant electronic connections between components. Remove the ones that you don't need and add required ones. Plus design and layout a circuit board with your new requirements and parts.

Which quite surprised me. Aren't circuit boards a large, already well researched and optimized field since they're inside everything? Is the autopilot board better than that of a laptop or smartphone?

Sure, hardware is hard, but it doesn't seem like differentiating knowledge in the tech industry (while maybe the other car makers are a few years behind in optimisation).

Circuit board layouts can be a nightmare. Automatic routing algorithms suck for networks of realistic sizes, so a lot of the work is done by hand and that is a mixture of tedium and art. If you are designing high power or high frequency circuits you also need to observe a lot of constraints in your layouts as well (distances between parts, potential cross talk between parallel traces, signal travelling time along the traces belonging to the same bus...).

Sure. Doesn't seem to change much for cars though. It doesn't seem like something Tesla has a significant competence in.

Even in high-stress environments, unless I missed something.

If you put a smartphone circuit board into a car it won't make it 5 years until failure from sheer mechanic stress. There is a reason you can buy automotive grade components, and it's not that car makers like to pay more or have less volume.

And ultimately, of course, circuit board weight or dimensions are not really a metric worth optimizing for something that goes in a car. If you can make it cheaper by only having 6 layers instead of 18 for a smaller version, auto makers will choose the penny pinching option every time.

The boards he was complimentary of when he was talking about circuit density are just standard off the shelf Nvidia DRIVE systems, not designed at all by Tesla - https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/hardware

The board in the video that Munro is holding up looks bigger and different than those two.

You're 100% sure those are the same?

Munro acknowledges that the chips are from NVidia, but claims the board to be unique.

They are not the same you are correct that board is hand laid by Tesla electrical engineers following loosely Nvidia electrical schematics but removing uneccesaary electrical subsystems and adding ones like on board GPS receiver.

False. NVidia is not supplying off-the-shelf DRIVE systems. They supply the chips that go on them but the board design and manufacturing is by Tesla.

Those boards are from Nvidia. They're stripped down variants of the PX Drive 2.

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