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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 22 2017, @11:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the cars-aren't-intelligent,-they-only-*think*-they-are dept.

According to CNBC, Tesla is teaming up with AMD to develop a custom chip optimized for AI, to be used for self-driving features in Tesla cars. The head of Tesla's "Autopilot" team is Jim Keller, formerly of AMD and Apple, who helped design the A4 and A5 chips while working at Apple and was lead architect on the Athlon 64 at AMD.

Also at Engadget, TechCrunch, and Business Insider

GlobalFoundries, which fabricates chips for Advanced Micro Devices Inc, said on Thursday that Tesla had not committed to working with it on any autonomous driving technology or product, contradicting an earlier media report. [...] The spokesperson for GlobalFoundries said that Jha’s comments at the GlobalFoundries Technology Conference were not reported accurately.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Tesla Burns More Cash, Fails to Meet Production Targets 16 comments

Auto production is hard:

Having racked up its first quarter of burning through more than $1 billion of cash in the three months ending in June, Tesla topped that with $1.4 billion of negative free cash flow in the third quarter. In the past two quarters, therefore, Tesla has burned through more cash than the previous six combined. More importantly, it has burned through roughly four out of every five of the $3.2 billion dollars it has raised since late March through selling new equity and convertible debt and its debut in the high-yield bond market.

Consequently, debt has soared. Even just using debt with recourse to the company, on a net basis it has almost tripled since the start of the year to $3.36 billion.This would matter less if the primary objective of sucking in most of that external funding -- mass production of the Model 3 -- was fast approaching. Instead, it has receded further.

When Musk first talked about production targets for the Model 3 in 2016, they implied Tesla would be producing roughly 3,800 to 7,600 a week in the second half of 2017. By July of this year, Musk was guiding toward production hitting about 5,000 a week by the end of December. I estimated at the time that this implied a second-half average of maybe 1,400 a week.

Now, Musk estimates production might hit 5,000 a week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. As for this year, it might be in "the thousands" by the time New Year's Eve rolls around. He refused to say what the current run rate was. But I would estimate Tesla will be lucky to produce 10,000 Model 3 vehicles in total this year, or an average of 400 a week for the second half -- roughly 5 to 10 percent of the original guidance. As for the earlier target of 10,000 a week in 2018 ...

Also at NYT and MarketWatch.

Previously: Tesla Adds Lots of Certified Pre-Owned Model S Vehicles for Under $40,000 with New Warranty
Time to Bash Tesla Model 3
Tesla Reportedly Teaming Up With AMD for Custom AI Chip
Tesla Fires Hundreds of Employees


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:26AM (4 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:26AM (#571914) Homepage

    The spontaneous horrific fiery crashes of Tesla have teamed up with the decimal point-misplacing precision of AMD to bring you the ultimate In-Q-Tel-funded killmobiles! For national security!

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:32AM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:32AM (#571915) Journal

      the decimal point-misplacing precision of AMD

      Got a citation for that? The only such bug I can find was the well-known one from Intel:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:52AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:52AM (#571938)

      And it doesn't even run on alcohol? Or any other freedom fuel for that matter? For shame!

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @04:04AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @04:04AM (#571994)

      This story was refuted in the comments on slashdot when it was posted yesterday. This was fake news yesterday and is fake news today. Go check the comments if in doubt.

      Wish beauhd or msmash or whoever keeps cross posting these fucking articles would get banned.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by steveha on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:51AM

        by steveha (4100) on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:51AM (#572044)

        Wish beauhd or msmash or whoever keeps cross posting these fucking articles would get banned.

        Hi, I submitted the story about a half day before it went up at Slashdot. I don't know when the Slashdot story was submitted, but it could have been submitted after I submitted mine if they grab stories out of their queue faster.

        It's not great that it appeared here after it appeared on Slashdot and was debunked, but I'm not angry about it.

        Also, I was careful to put the word "Reportedly" in the headline. The story I submitted was correct: CNBC did report that according to "a source" this story was true. Please don't accuse me of spreading "fake news".

        The definitive debunking comment was this one: https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11141441&cid=55238497 [slashdot.org] That was posted by Charlie Demerjian, an editor at the SemiAccurate [semiaccurate.com] web site. (Or at least that's who that poster claims to be.)

        I really wonder if the "source" who tipped off CNBC was holding a short position in AMD stock or something.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 23 2017, @10:48AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 23 2017, @10:48AM (#572068) Journal
    Ok, so this is a fake news story. Let's try to recover something from the exercise. If hypothetically one were to develop a CPU, GPU, or whatnot for supporting an self-driving application, what sort of stuff would be good to stick in there? Massive I/O bandwidth? Image processing support?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:22PM (#572082)

      Here's what Nvidia is pitching,
          http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html [nvidia.com]

      But this market is a fast moving target (like pedestrians??), with new sensors and new algorithms all the time.

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