2 ms·
Absolutely it is possible to do better by specializing, that doesn’t mean we generally expect an auto-maker to be able to successfully make nVidia’s best effort
by zaroth 8y ago
Absolutely it is possible to do better by specializing, that doesn’t mean we generally expect an auto-maker to be able to successfully make nVidia’s best effort in the same marketplace obsolete in their first go at designing their own chip.
This isn’t quite like GPU vs ASIC for Bitcoin mining, for instance, because nVidia Xavier is already a special purpose chip for doing the Int8 calculations. Tesla isn’t competing against a graphics card being repurposed for FSD, they are competing against nVidia’s FSD offering, and using an industry standard metric (Int8 TOPS) to measure their performance.
- Traster 8y agoI think you're massively under-estimating the difference in specialization. Tesla know the resolution of the data going into the Neural Nets, they know the depth of the data, they know the types of non-convolution stages (pooling, ReLU Sigmoid etc). They've probably got a fixed number of layers too. So they're basically completely getting rid of the control logic. That's an enormous chunk of the problem, and lets' remember these are peak performance numbers - the Tesla programming model may be a disaster. Hell, they could probably have bought the IP for the actual computation core.