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Comment by slivym | Hacker News Reader

>By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own pace. If they suddenly recognize something the hardware is lacking, they’re not waiting on someone else to build it. It’s by no means a trivial task — but if they can pull it off without breaking the bank (and Elon says it costs them “the same as the current hardware”), it could end up being a significant strength.

I outright snorted at this. Time to market is not why you build a custom chip instead of software. Is this article written by a complete bonehead?

Tesla has it's own hardware platform. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know that was always going to happen because of power consumption, cost and performance. The Nvidia Drive platform is designed to be a quick way to get to market with FuSa. The requirements for fully autonomous modes are estimated by some to be over 10x higher than the top CPU/GPU offerings.

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> Is this article written by a complete bonehead?

They also published the quote about iPhone leading in performance and go-to-market because of their custom SoC efforts, and they mentioned Tesla's SoC program manager Pete Bannon, but they didn't even bother to connect the two ideas: Pete Bannon was the guy who led Apple's SoC efforts to develop the first 64 Bit ARM chip for mobile.

They also didn't mention what Elon said about now being able to run all the cameras at full resolution and full framerate.

This article could have been so much better.

They have also conflated silicon and silicone, which is humorous.

Blame the English language for making the name of 2 popular industrial materials with such similar names.

I think I'd blame the English language for the same word havint two different meanings. Not two different words meaning two different things.

That's a very Right opinion, even though it may not be right. You do have that right, however. Anyway, I've got to get back to work right away.

But the materials are not even remotely similar. Silicon is a metallic element. Silicone is a polymer. Anyone who would make that mistake clearly has zero idea what they’re talking about, and it makes me question the entire article.

And both words have a one letter difference, which makes an easy typo, and could slip past an editor, I suppose. You’re centering on the disparate meaning of the words, leading to incredulity, when you might do better to focus on the question of how such an obvious mistake slipped through the cracks.

IOW, yeah, it’s a crap article, but not for this reason.

Indeed, it's an easy mistake to make, as I discovered when I lost my 30 foot catamaran at a local coat check.

I don't know; it's not really surprising that a polymer has a name reflective of the metalloid that is the key element along with oxygen in its backbone chain.

Every time I see this typo I think of the company Silicon Knights which was just one letter away from sounding like the title to a porno film.

>Tesla has it's own hardware platform. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know that was always going to happen because of power consumption, cost and performance

... so that they can create performance-intensive features that nobody else in the market yet has, because the off-the-shelf hardware won't allow it. Due to power consumption, cost and performance issues. And this custom hardware is being developed to solve them.

You're basically saying the same thing in different words. I mean, what else do you do with better power consumption, cost and performance other than new, better-working features? You think Tesla will sell cars to the mass market with impressive computer specs?

Apple's own custom hardware has enabled it to experiment with performance-intensive features unlike other smartphone manufacturers, Tesla is going for the same strategy.

Other people are going to be using inferencing chips soon too. Tesla might even just be basing it all on NVDLA (Nvidia's open source inferencing hardware targeted at self driving) and calling it their own.

Of course the competitors will follow. But Tesla will probably be first and a step ahead in the future, hence the talk about go-to-market speed.

Waymo has possibly already been using it for years as Google pioneered that type of chip.

We made it easy to switch out the computer, and that’s all that needs to be done. You take out one computer, and plug in the next.

Will existing Tesla owners be able to swap the computer? Or is the swap happening only inside the factory, to the next generation of the Teslas they're building?

This may be one way in which Tesla's approach differs from Apple's.

">By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own pace ... "

This is not what Musk said on the conference call. Surely some bonehead reporter is writing this. Musk said the latter, precisely to go from current 200 fps speed to something like 2000 fps (I might have the numbers wrong, but it's a 10x improvement) and that they have been doing this in stealth for the last 2-3 years. They expect the cost of the new chips to be the same as that of the current nVidia lineup. That got me thinking though. What are they currently using - the Titans ?

The board that was shipping since Oct 2016 is a drive px2 custom. Basically, a pascal gp106(gtx 1060 equiv) and a denver 2+cortex a57 cpu. I think hardware 2.5 added another parker chip. Figure $400-500 max per board.

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