On Monday at Tesla's Autonomy Day home event, Elon Musk, along with the company's top developers the final version of the autopilot. The Hardware 3 platform is already being installed on the company's vehicles, which began production in April this year. Previously released Tesla electric vehicles will have to be converted to support this option. This will either be free if the car was purchased with a premium surcharge, or for money. Depending on the , the cost of a full autopilot will range from $2500 to $7000.
At the heart of the platform lies a processor entirely developed by Tesla engineers. The chip is produced at the Samsung plant in the USA (Austin, Texas). The technical process of the solution is 14 nm FinFet. The crystal area is 260 mm2. The chip has 6 billion transistors. The transistor budget is distributed between 12 ARM Cortex A72 cores, integrated graphics and interfaces. The core frequency reaches 2,2 GHz. The graphics runs at 1 GHz with a performance of 600 gigaflops. The platform is capable of processing up to 2,5 billion pixels per second or 2100 frames per second. Onboard memory - LPDDR4 with a 128-bit bus and a performance of 4266 Gb / s (68 GB / s). The performance of the neural network accelerator reaches 2 × 36 TOPS.
Recall that in the recent past, Tesla abandoned the NVIDIA Drive PX2 platform in favor of its own development. According to Tesla developers, the company's platform operates at up to 144 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), which is significantly higher than the 21 TOPS that the NVIDIA Drive PX2 platform was capable of. A little later, NVIDIA commented on this comparison. Firstly, NVIDIA said that the Drive PX2 performance reaches 30 TOPS, not 21. Secondly, and more importantly, back in 2017, the company offered the Drive AGX Pegasus platform for autonomous driving with a performance of 320 TOPS. So by partnering with NVIDIA, Tesla could deliver an autopilot with more than twice the performance today. In this comparison, by the way, Tesla shares sank 3,8% yesterday, while NVIDIA shares rose 1,2%.
Be that as it may, Tesla is ready to bring fully autonomous cars to the roads. The company promises to get permission to operate autopilots next year, but the platform will be able to work better than human drivers by the end of this year. The Tesla autopilot system, we recall, relies mainly on 8 constantly working cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Musk has again come under fire for lidars, which he considers an expensive and redundant solution for autopilot cars. A neural network, driving experience on highways with a total length of billions of kilometers, and many simultaneously processed video streams will be a sufficient basis for safe autonomous driving, and the probability of platform failure will be lower than cases of loss of consciousness by drivers.
Source: 3dnews.ru