> But anyway, you dodged my entire point about cost-to-performance ratio by looking just at performance
"Dodged" ?? Unless you have the exact numbers for the amount of dollars Tesla has spent on mask-costs, chip engineers, and software developers, we're all taking a guess on that.
But we all know that such an engineering effort is in the 100-million+ project size or more. Maybe even $Billion+ size.
All of our estimates will vary, and the people who work inside of Tesla would never tell us this number. But even in the middle hundreds-of-millions, it seems rather difficult for Tesla to recoup costs.
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Especially compared to say... using an AMD MI250X or Google's TPUs or something. (Its not like NVidia is the only option, they're just the most complete and braindead option. But AMD MI250x have tensor cores as well that are competitive to A100, albeit missing the software engineering of the CUDA ecosystem)
> For 7 nm, it costs more than $271 million for design alone (EDA, verification, synthesis, layout, sign-off, etc) [1], and that’s a cheaper one. Industry reports say $650-810 million for a big 5 nm chip.
How many chips does Tesla need to make before this is economically viable? And for what? They seemingly aren't even outperforming the A100 or MI250x, let alone the next-generation GH100.
What's your estimate on the cost of an all-custom 7nm chip with no compiler-infrastructure, no software support and 100% all manual software built from the ground up with no previous ecosystem?
"Dodged" ?? Unless you have the exact numbers for the amount of dollars Tesla has spent on mask-costs, chip engineers, and software developers, we're all taking a guess on that.
But we all know that such an engineering effort is in the 100-million+ project size or more. Maybe even $Billion+ size.
All of our estimates will vary, and the people who work inside of Tesla would never tell us this number. But even in the middle hundreds-of-millions, it seems rather difficult for Tesla to recoup costs.
-------
Especially compared to say... using an AMD MI250X or Google's TPUs or something. (Its not like NVidia is the only option, they're just the most complete and braindead option. But AMD MI250x have tensor cores as well that are competitive to A100, albeit missing the software engineering of the CUDA ecosystem)
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Ex: A quickie search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959053
> For 7 nm, it costs more than $271 million for design alone (EDA, verification, synthesis, layout, sign-off, etc) [1], and that’s a cheaper one. Industry reports say $650-810 million for a big 5 nm chip.
How many chips does Tesla need to make before this is economically viable? And for what? They seemingly aren't even outperforming the A100 or MI250x, let alone the next-generation GH100.
What's your estimate on the cost of an all-custom 7nm chip with no compiler-infrastructure, no software support and 100% all manual software built from the ground up with no previous ecosystem?