Tesla Self-Driving Chip: stripped-down version of Google TPU?
Apr 23, 2019
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Elon claimed it’s 21x faster on achievable performance metric compared to Nvidia, which I feel kinda stretch, but doable. Peak OPS/FLOPS doesn’t matter without sustainable utilization a chip can deliver for real workload.
Is this what Jim Keller was hired for? As he left to work for Intel last year (likely to pioneer MobileEye), I guess we might seeing TPU variants in future Intel/MobileEye chips? How’d that fare compared to Nervana accelerator?
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Compared to TPU which accelerates both learning and inference and has to support programming from a framework like TensorFlow. And is meant for batch jobs rather than real-time frame by frame jobs.
And yes it is likely closer to TPUv1 if you want to compare
All guesses though.
And yeah, don't believe the numbers Elon quotes. They are wrong, and Nvidia published a blog post related to Elons claims.
While the Xavier likely has a theoretical peak of 30 TOPS, Tesla is probably quoting what they managed to achieve using their own workload.
Notice that a good deal of time was spent during the presentation talking about the data flow and on-chip SRAM. And how much it was emphasized that this was a very single purpose chip without many modes or computational flows. It would not surprise me if they were able to hit near peak theoretical TOPS with their own chip.
Elon doesn’t care about this company. That’s why he embezzled from it to bailout his and his cousins insolvent solar city company. It about money. Elon has taken margin loans against his Tesla equity and cannot have the stock price go down too much, even if that’d be good for the company.
https://twitter.com/richardkeppler1/status/1120888716132790272?s=21
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