Tesla
Elon Musk completes Tesla AI5 chip design review, adds AI8 in the roadmap
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has completed the AI5 chip design review with California and Texas chip engineers, pushing the production plan forward. Tesla’s AI chips are custom-designed system-on-chip (SoCs) optimized for AI workloads.
Specifically, these chipsets power Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software in vehicles. It enables Tesla EVs to handle real-time neural network inference for autonomous driving. In other words, it empowers object detection, real-time map generation, and other important autonomous driving features.
The goal with these chipsets is to provide low-latency inference directly into vehicles, while being efficient for training larger models. On the other hand, the company has optimized its design to tightly collaborate the software stack for maximum performance.
The current generation AI chipset has 144 Tops (dual-chip setup) and 16GB RAM, it’s used in vehicle launching in 2023 and afterward, and supports the latest FSD v14, produced by Samsung.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, completed the AI5 chip review
AI5, which Musk has just completed a design review of, is expected to boost 10 times overall capability and up to 40 times performance in inference speed for neural nets. It could offer 8x raw compute, a massive increase in on-board memory, and 3 times better power management. The AI5 chip will be produced by TSMC.
The Tesla CEO has already announced extensive plans to produce the AI6 chip with Samsung at its Taylor, Texas, fab plant. The EV maker has closed $16+ billion multi-year production deal. Musk has labeled this chip as “the best AI chip by far”.
While there’s no information available on AI7 and A8, Musk described the latter as “out of the world” technology. This suggests a major architectural jump, but no specifics are available to speculate on this matter at the moment.
Tesla is pushing its expertise with Full Self Driving (FSD) to the public with the Robotaxi launch and aiming for the Robotics market with Optimus, which could start mass production next year. That said, these chipsets will play a pivotal role in Tesla’s progression with respective goals.
