Surprised they aren’t using intel… samsung prob offered a sweeeeet deal to use the entire texas fab for Ai6 production. 🤷♂️
Intel fab processes are not even as advanced as Samsung, let alone TMSC.
There is no way Tesla requires $16.5 Billion in chips for cars. On an estimated 2 million cars per year, over say 5 years, $16.5B means their AI6 chip costs $1,650 per car. That’s insanely expensive. The chip going into an iPhone is only $50 or so, at 90mm^2. HW3 is 260mm^2 or 2.9 times bigger. Cost isn’t linear because die yield decreases as size of die goes up, but that’s still well under $250 a chip. HW4 used slightly larger dies than HW3 but unless they are planning on reticle limit sized chips for HW6 this deal makes no sense.
Idk they can recuperate that with 1 year of FSD subscription, approximately
But they charge 1000 bucks for the phone anyway. So it can only mean TSMC would only charge even more
Apple makes 45-50% profit margins on hardware, and the A chip isn’t the only cost they have in the BOM. An iPhone’s COG is supposed to be around the $400-$500 range. $50 is estimated as the cost TSMC charges Apple per A18, which would be 1/10 or so of the overall cost. But the same is true for Tesla - they need memory, PCBs, connectors, etc…none of which are being supplied in this deal. The cost of raw compute chips is going to be a bigger portion of the expense in a self driving module compared to a phone (no need for a screen, speakers, CNC carved titanium case) but not everything. Which is why such an expense is even more significant.
Another article I read mentioned that these chips will be used in their data centers also.
That makes more sense. Both increases the number of units produced and explains why they need and/or want such an overpowered chip. I’m a bit confused then though because what you want in a data center is a chip optimized for training on data, an in a car you want one focused on inference. It could be cheaper to make just one chipset that can do both but seems odd.
Maybe they are planning to deploy a much more powerful HW with a way bigger chip area
Yeah but if so, why? It’s not a good sign for self driving if they are planning on tossing that much power at the problem. Likely speaks to some sort of issue with the current approach.
What do you mean? Self driving needs tremendous amount of compute power. Especially if you include additional inputs like radar / lidar
Intel are like the Carburetor ICE engines of the chip industry. Just the name Intel makes me barf.
This unified chip design will be used not just in cars, but everything Elon controls. Robots, datacenters, I assume SpaceX related stuff too.
Surprised this isnt for DOJO. But also AI6 with be used in their Robots, not just cars.
Intel is shit right now. There is a reason stock is tanking.
So is samsungs chip business.
The use the same chips for their Optimus robots. They will be producing millions of robots by then and car production is likely to go over 2 million also with robotaxi and lower cost models
You have to remember this is being used for far more than just vehicles. This will be used for Dojo training computers, and Optimus robots. Cybercab will use a ton too.
18A seems promising.
I bet they are, seems like an Elon thing to do. If you can’t beat them stuff a B200 in the glovebox.
If even Elon says something is a long shot it’s dead. IBM is still trying with Power but seems like a very hard challenge to beat NVIDIA/AMD/Apple etc and build cars at the same time.
Samsung has money and income to burn to make the foundry business survive from other sources. Intel not so mich
Training AI requires SO much compute
AI6 will also end up in xAI data centres and in Optimus. And to run Grok locally in cars, there may be more than two of them. As Elon said, AI6 will be "profound". u/Samesone2334 (don't know why but I cannot reply in the Tesla subs after a few days.) Thousands of AI4s are already used in data centres to test inference before testing in cars, so AI6 will at least be used the same way. However, they have said that AI6 is a more generalised architecture so may be usable also for image selection and image generation and other tasks in the data centre.
The extra compute isn't needed for FSD. It will be used for running Grok locally which makes it possible to use it for vehicle control even while driving. Expect to find more than a pair of redundant AI6 chips in the car and more than one in Optimus.
And xAI training and inference.
I was just going to say this...Should have been Intel, for SOOOO many reasons. Smh
That's fucking funny. Samsung is absolutely running shit right now. Intel is out of their element.
I think that is optimistic for Optimus. Tesla geared up for 500k-1M Cybertrucks a year. A Cybertruck in every garage! That turned out to be 50k a year, maybe. I see Iess of a market for a laundry folding robot that you need to deliver the laundry to. Job specific robots are far preferred in industry. A consumer grade robot will be expensive first, and mistrusted more.
Sweet!
So Ai6 will be one architecture design that can fill all those needs??
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