Tesla held the “Tesla Autonomy Day” on 22nd Apr, and disclosed their fully new Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer. It has two FSD chips and achieves 144TOPS. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said it’s the best chip in the world. They also plan to have a new chip which has 3 times the performance of existing FSD after 2 years.
This new FSD is in all new Model S, Model X and Model 3 now. During the meeting, Tesla explained FSD in details deeply. FSD is specifically built for Tesla’s cars and neural network.
Musk said that they only care self-driving and they build software designed specifically to work with the hardware. He believes their customized software and hardware combination is unbeatable.
FSD was charged by Pete Bannon who joined Tesla in 2016 from Apple. He and Jim Keller were leading Apple’s processor development since Apple bought its chip firm PA Semi in 2008. They lead the development of Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, which used in iPhone and other products from 2010 to 2012. Bannon said, he never joined a project that could improve the performance more than 3 times like in Tesla.
Some key parameters of FSD chip
- 37.5mm x 37.5mm BGA
- 14nm FinFET CMOS
- 250 million gates
- 6 billion transistors
- LPDDR4 DRAM 128b@4266 Gb/s
- 36 TOPS@ 2GHz, 2 per chip, 72 TOPS total for neural network processor
- 600 GFLOPS for GPU
- 12 ARM A72 64b CPUs 2.2 GHz as the main processor
- One safety system for control validation in chip level
Without paying a chip teardown report, Tesla just tells you how they designed FSD chip and how great it is.