My problem with articles like these is the sensational headlines that Tesla made an AMD/Nvidia killer. AMD and Nvidia could both make this chip if they wanted to, but dedicating all the die to matrix multiply cores is a waste for most end users. The media makes it seem like Tesla did something revolutionary here, but all they did was make a very, very targeted asic.
That makes sense. Certainly lots of journalism is bad. I haven’t read the article actually. I’ve just watched the two hour presentation by Tesla as well as their past presentations. I am a robotics engineer and I’ve been trying to understand how best to make an “animal like” brain system for an autonomous robot in the real world. I have been pleased with how much Tesla shared about their system and I think their extremely powerful hardware and their neural network approach is ideal for solving this problem. So I’m very happy with what they’ve come up with and I’m happy that it will push competitors to do the same as I think very large neural networks might be needed to solve general purpose robotics.
So all in all I think the chip is very good and I think they are on a path to success. Whatever the article says to hype it up doesn’t change the value of what Tesla has done in my eyes.
