Report: Tesla to source next-gen FSD self driving chips from TSMC

[Old Spice]

Tesla reportedly places massive order of next-gen self-driving chips with TSMC
https://electrek.co/2022/11/21/tesla-massive-order-next-gen-self-driving-chips-tsmc/

Tesla's next-generation FSD chips to be supplied by TSMC: report
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-next-gen-fsd-chip-hw4-tsmc-report/

 

[greggertruck]

Sounded kind of like it’s been going on too! So that’s a good sign

 

[Macgyverfever]

I can't wait to play with FSD - kinda weird paying 12K for something you can't even use

 

[Crissa]

I can't wait to play with FSD - kinda weird paying 12K for something you can't even use

It's a promise by Tesla to upgrade your vehicle. You buy things you don't use all the time - most of it insurance, but still.

-Crissa

 

[Macgyverfever]

It's a promise by Tesla to upgrade your vehicle. You buy things you don't use all the time - most of it insurance, but still.

-Crissa

I know, but talking about it on here is free therapy

 

[Ogre]

Kind of looks like Tesla is having TSMC fab a chip they designed in-house similar to what Apple does.

The goal was to design a super powerful and efficient chip to achieve self-driving in consumer vehicles without additional hardware like in custom-built autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo and Cruise.

Presumably, this will be am ARM based CPU as well since most modern architectures are based on ARM. Be interesting to see a tear down with an analysis of these things. Likely massively optimized for processing Neural nets.

 

[Ogre]

Another coincidence in timing here. Usually takes 6 months for a foundry to produce new products for the end market… 6 months. Sounds familiar. Lots of things confirming this middle of next year release.

Originally this was going to be sourced from Samsung, the switch to TSMC means likely switching to a smaller die size which means better performance and/ or a more efficient processors.

Source

 

[Macgyverfever]

I know, but talking about it on here is free therapy

And this morning I just got FSD LMAO (smh I told you guys to tell me to shut up didn't I?)

 

[CyberGus]

One of my major peeves is UI lag. There's no tactile feedback on a touchscreen GUI, so responsiveness must be very fast, and I hope HW4 meets this standard.

That said, I hope they manage to optimize Sentry Mode. It consumes 300W but is way too useful to forgo.

 

[Ogre]

One of my major peeves is UI lag. There's no tactile feedback on a touchscreen GUI, so responsiveness must be very fast, and I hope HW4 meets this standard.

That said, I hope they manage to optimize Sentry Mode. It consumes 300W but is way too useful to forgo.

I’m not sure if this chip is used to run to console at all. Hmm, interesting question.

I think they have 2 of these for running FSD and a third chip for the console? That’s why when your console crashes FSD is still working.

 

[firsttruck]

I’m not sure if this chip is used to run to console at all. Hmm, interesting question.

I think they have 2 of these for running FSD and a third chip for the console? That’s why when your console crashes FSD is still working.

Originally console (MCU ) used the Intel Atom.
Updated models use AMD Ryzen ( also known as MCU3 ).

--------------------------------

Tesla’s Potent AMD Ryzen Upgrade Arrives Stateside for Model 3, Model Y
The new AMD Ryzen chip absolutely smokes the old Intel Atom chip.
By Brandon Hill
published December 29, 2021
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-tesla-model-3-model-y

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How to find out what options a Tesla has
01-Sep-2022
https://tesla-info.com/guide/How-to-find-out-what-options-a-Tesla-has.php

.....
Additional Information examples
MCUx, HDWx, AutoPilot, Heat pump, Lithium Ion LV battery



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[Ogre]

Just double checked. The Tesla does indeed have 2 redundant processors for FSD and one separate one in the Main Computer Unit (MCU) which you can replace independently.

@firsttruck has some good details above on the various MCUs in the car. The above info I posted is on the FSD computers.

This will be the 3rd/ 4th generation of FSD computers Tesla has shipped.

FSD HW 1.0 Early Teslas came with a MobileEye computer.

FSD HW 2.X Uses an Nvidia based compute platform estimated to be 40x faster than HW 1.0

FSD HW 3.x Uses two Tesla-designed processors, which improves the performance over HW2 by about 2.5 times. The new processors each have twelve ARM Cortex-A72 64-bit cores, running at 2.2 GHz. Each chip also contains 2 Neural Network Accelerators with 32 MB SRAM for each accelerator and an ARM Mali GPU.

FSD HW 4.0 will likely be 10x faster than FW 3.0 but will be required to process images with 4x more pixels so they won’t be 10x faster. The additional resolution will make object identification much more reliable and there will still be a significant reduction in latency.



I think the cores in HW 3.0 and HW 4.0 can operate in tandem to make them even faster, but I’m not sure how they switch from being redundant to just being faster. It would be a neat trick if the system just identifies one is faulted and switches to single core, but I’m not sure that’s possible.

 

[Crissa]

The two computers are redundancy, using slightly different seeds to avoid bottlenecks and making sure there is always an answer for the driving software.

-Crissa

 

[SolarWizard]

One of my major peeves is UI lag. There's no tactile feedback on a touchscreen GUI, so responsiveness must be very fast, and I hope HW4 meets this standard.

That said, I hope they manage to optimize Sentry Mode. It consumes 300W but is way too useful to forgo.

I hope they can install much higher resolution cameras.
the sentry mode quality in my Y was laughably terrible compared to a $75 dash cam. since now Tesla is full bore camera only I think I’d feel Much safer if the input was 4k/8k instead of 2004 webcam

 

[Ogre]

I hope they can install much higher resolution cameras.
the sentry mode quality in my Y was laughably terrible compared to a $75 dash cam. since now Tesla is full bore camera only I think I’d feel Much safer if the input was 4k/8k instead of 2004 webcam

They have 8 cameras for Autopilot/ Sentry mode. They need to be affordable. Also, higher resolution cameras require a lot more processing power which also adds to the price.

Cameras and better computers are more affordable now so HW 4 will be a big upgrade.