4 ms·

Compared to the energy needed to move the car, everything else is pretty irrelevant. Power hungry features like Heating/AC only makes a few % difference to rang

Compared to the energy needed to move the car, everything else is pretty irrelevant. Power hungry features like Heating/AC only makes a few % difference to range.

mrep 7y ago
From autonomy day hacker news comment: "Pegasus consumes about 500Watts, compared to under 100 Watts for Tesla's FSD computer. Elon in particular emphasized the performance per watt (as it's always possible to cram more chips to increase performance if you ignore cost and power consumption). The comparison made in the video: 500Watts for an hour consumes about 2-3 miles of range. In a city in slow traffic, going 12mph, that's a significant range reduction. So you might have a 10% improvement in range for the Tesla ASIC in low speed conditions" [0]. Also, Tesla is/was planning on running these chips even while not in autonomous mode in order to spot new scenarios which it can then record what the car sees and what the human does in order to collect a lot more unique road scenarios to train their models with. [0] Credit Robotbeat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729743
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Good ol' velocity-cubed. Increasing their compute per watt allows them to get more compute per watt, so they will pursue it lots, low speed energy savings are a way of making the range extension seem like a big deal when it isn't (maintaining highway speeds requires tens of kilowatts).
  - mlyle 7y ago
    It was a big deal for Tesla, though, because they had to fit into a tiny power budget. HW2.0 wasn't enough for what they wanted to do, and to retrofit existing cars they had to consume a similar amount of power. Power efficiency does make a range difference and is worth seeking, but Tesla is exaggerating this, IMO, to conceal one of the ways that the churn-heavy cycle for FSD has imposed organizational costs (an entire chip-level hardware program, in this case).
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      I would expect them to seek compute/watt basically until they stopped making progress. An actual working system might slow them down, but even then, better hardware is one of the ways to make it better.
      - mlyle 7y ago
        Designing ICs is a very expensive treadmill. If you can buy fast enough hardware to do your job, it's really hard to justify spending a lot for something that may be nominally a little better on some metric. There's commodity computing of comparable throughput that other automakers can incorporate without too much cost, but it doesn't fit into the existing TM3 vehicles because it has a larger footprint in power, space, and cooling than HW2. Here, Tesla spends a bunch of money to develop HW3 and overcome this problem, but the advantage in a new car design between HW3's efficiency and commodity hardware is limited.
- codeulike 7y ago
  Wow, I stand corrected
barney54 7y ago
The compute for autonomous driving could be 10% of the total energy budget of the car. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/13/autonomous-cars-shorter-range-due-high-power-consumption-computers/ https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/13/autonomous-cars-shorter...

Compared to the energy needed to move the car, everything else is pretty irrelevant. Power hungry features like Heating/AC only makes a few % difference to range.

mrep 7y ago

From autonomy day hacker news comment: "Pegasus consumes about 500Watts, compared to under 100 Watts for Tesla's FSD computer. Elon in particular emphasized the performance per watt (as it's always possible to cram more chips to increase performance if you ignore cost and power consumption). The comparison made in the video: 500Watts for an hour consumes about 2-3 miles of range. In a city in slow traffic, going 12mph, that's a significant range reduction. So you might have a 10% improvement in range for the Tesla ASIC in low speed conditions" [0]. Also, Tesla is/was planning on running these chips even while not in autonomous mode in order to spot new scenarios which it can then record what the car sees and what the human does in order to collect a lot more unique road scenarios to train their models with. [0] Credit Robotbeat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729743

maxerickson 7y ago
Good ol' velocity-cubed. Increasing their compute per watt allows them to get more compute per watt, so they will pursue it lots, low speed energy savings are a way of making the range extension seem like a big deal when it isn't (maintaining highway speeds requires tens of kilowatts).
- mlyle 7y ago
  It was a big deal for Tesla, though, because they had to fit into a tiny power budget. HW2.0 wasn't enough for what they wanted to do, and to retrofit existing cars they had to consume a similar amount of power. Power efficiency does make a range difference and is worth seeking, but Tesla is exaggerating this, IMO, to conceal one of the ways that the churn-heavy cycle for FSD has imposed organizational costs (an entire chip-level hardware program, in this case).
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    I would expect them to seek compute/watt basically until they stopped making progress. An actual working system might slow them down, but even then, better hardware is one of the ways to make it better.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Designing ICs is a very expensive treadmill. If you can buy fast enough hardware to do your job, it's really hard to justify spending a lot for something that may be nominally a little better on some metric. There's commodity computing of comparable throughput that other automakers can incorporate without too much cost, but it doesn't fit into the existing TM3 vehicles because it has a larger footprint in power, space, and cooling than HW2. Here, Tesla spends a bunch of money to develop HW3 and overcome this problem, but the advantage in a new car design between HW3's efficiency and commodity hardware is limited.
codeulike 7y ago
Wow, I stand corrected

barney54 7y ago

The compute for autonomous driving could be 10% of the total energy budget of the car. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/13/autonomous-cars-shorter-range-due-high-power-consumption-computers/ https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/13/autonomous-cars-shorter...