Last year, Tesla announced its new AI5 custom silicon designed for inference in its vehicles needed for autonomous driving. Like previous generations, it's designed in-house and was to be manufactured by TSMC, but now Samsung has also been added to the mix, with both foundries set to fabricate it at their U.S.-based facilities. In a new earnings call, Musk also detailed how the AI5 chip came to be and what it represents for the future of not only Tesla but also the intentional spillover that his other company, xAI, will benefit from.
“We are actually going to focus both TSMC and Samsung initially on AI5... Musk said. "Technically, the Samsung fab has slightly more advanced equipment than the TSMC fab. These will both be made in the US, one TSMC in Arizona, Samsung in Texas... Samsung, it's worth noting, does manufacture our AI4 computer and does a great job doing that.”
Musk spoke at a grand show about how the AI5 is superior to the outgoing AI4, saying that it performs up to 40x faster in certain tasks. Of course, only time will tell how true that claim is, or what the metric of comparison even is. He attributed the main driving factor behind this radical lead to Tesla's tunnel vision. Since the AI5 only has one client, it can be designed with absolute efficiency, focusing on current needs, while ditching legacy hardware that would otherwise hold back the silicon, denying it of its full potential. “We know what the chip needs to do, and just as importantly, we know what the chip doesn't need to do,” claimed Elon.
In many ways, Elon is going the opposite direction; where Nvidia has a myriad of eager customers, the AI5 has to satisfy no one beyond the world's richest person. That being said, Musk remains both grateful and appreciative of Nvidia in its technical ability to tackle contemporary silicon design:
"When you look at the various logic blocks in the chip, you increase the number of logic blocks, you also increase the interconnections between the logic blocks. So you can think of it like highways – how many highways do you need to connect the various parts of the chip?" he explained. Especially if you're not sure how much data is going to go between each logic block on the chip, then you kind of end up having giant highways going all over the place. It becomes almost an impossibly difficult design problem, and Nvidia has done an amazing job of dealing with almost an impossibly difficult set of requirements."
Originally, it was only TSMC that was supposedly contracted to build AI5 for Tesla, but in July of this year, Musk disclosed that Samsung had secured a $16.5 billion chipmaking deal with Tesla, which has now been confirmed as a manufacturer for the chip, alongside TSMC. Elon boasted that "this is a beautiful chip" that he's "poured so much life energy into" and is confident that it's "going to be a winner." Not carrying forward older hardware blocks has allowed Tesla to "fit AI5 in a half-reticle," suggesting impressive yields that would line up with his aforementioned oversupply ambitions.
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