Tesla’s next-generation autonomous driving chip is once again in the spotlight in the automotive and technology worlds. CEO Elon Musk has shared the specifications of the new AI5 chip, developed for autonomous driving technology called FSD.
Tesla is working on a new autonomous driving chip
According to Musk’s statements in a podcast, the AI5 is 40 times more powerful in some performance areas compared to the previous-generation HW4. The chip’s raw processing power has increased by 8 times, while its memory capacity has increased by 9 times.
Musk stated that he doesn’t see the AI5 as a simple hardware update, but rather an architectural leap. Tesla is said to have a better understanding of the hardware requirements for FSD, drawing on its experience with the HW3 and HW4 chips.
This new chip eliminates the bottlenecks experienced with the HW4. RAM, which currently stands at 16 GB in the HW4, increases to 144 GB with the AI5. This increase is said to be critical for the needs of artificial intelligence applications. The new chip’s power isn’t limited to numerical values. Musk explains that the 40x performance increase stems from the more efficient execution of computationally intensive operations, particularly those that struggled in HW4, in AI5.
For example, the “softmax” function, frequently used in AI models, now runs with fewer processing steps. Furthermore, AI5 dynamically manages mixed-precision models more effectively. Such optimizations are made possible by the full coordination of the hardware and software teams.
AI5 is expected to be the core chip for the next-generation FSD software. While Tesla previously announced that it would implement unsupervised FSD on HW4, Musk’s statements suggest that this experience could be first introduced in AI5 and then adapted to HW4.
