Tesla Packs 50B Transistors onto D1 Dojo Chip (opens in new tab)

Rolling your own ASIC makes sense if you need to churn out enormous quantities for your own use. The actual cost of fabrication is largely weighted toward non-recurring engineering costs. Once the printing press fires up, chips are very inexpensive.

Does Tesla need tens of thousands of these things?

I think I'm this case, the main advantage is controlling their own destiny when it comes to building the types of models they need.

I think in 25% of cases it will not get them significantly more performance vs Nvidia.

There is a 50% chance that they can outperform off the shelf chips by a significant amount to make it maybe worth it. (This is pretty likely because dedicated hardware tends to outperform general hardware).

However, there is maybe a 25% risk buying Nvidia doesn't get them there soon.

So building their own chips de-risks the worst case, and it's probably not that much more expensive (at Tesla scale). So seems like a pretty good bet to me.

With the recent buzz about AI semiconductor design and drive for domestic semiconductor manufacture they are likely positioning themselves to be capable of investing in the next generation of fabrication. Leverage with the government and potential funding.

When comparing it to other large designs, I think it’s not exceptional, but also not in the back of the pack. This die is 645mm², or a square inch. We could create a wafer that size in the 1960s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics)#Standard_w.... Note these are for circular wafers, so a 1 inch wafer is about ¾ square inch), so in that sense, it isn’t a surprise that we can make such a chip.

We couldn’t put 50B transistors on a square inch in the 1960s, though. We can now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count lists several larger designs.

So, the engineering is impressive, but not spectacular.

Also, this being a grid of interconnected CPUs means the design is simpler than a single design filling the entire die would be. It’s ‘just’ repeating the same design over and over (possibly with some small variations near the edge)

Of course looking at it without knowledge of the state of the art it is astounding that we can even think of constructing machines with 50 billion working parts

The Apple M1 chip, which is much smaller and has lower power consumption, has 16B.

> […] AI has a massive value to every aspect of the company's work.

That's also just wrong. During the recent "Tesla AI Day", when asked during Q/A, Elon Musk specifically mentioned that they intentionally use machine learning only for very few cases:

    Q: "Is Tesla using machine learning within its manufacturing, design
    or any other engineering processes?"
    
    Elon: "I discourage use of machine learning, because it's really
    difficult. Unless you have to use machine learning, don't do it. It's
    usually a red flag when somebody is saying 'We wanna use machine
    learning to solve this task'. I'm like: That sounds like bullshit.
    99.9% of the time you don't need it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M&t=9307s

IMO that first paragraph is great, especially for readers who may not have your level of industry knowledge and technical acumen. It efficiently contextualizes the article and addresses a common complaint that I often see even on HN — the failure to clearly answer "What is this and why does this matter?"

It reads like Bart Simpson’s report on Libya.

Definitely not written by a native English speaker, and if it was, that person needs to get a new career.

The maximum die size is interesting but not really the point. The context is more the complexity and capability of the chip, for which transistor count is about as good a measure as you're going to fit in the headline. The immediate subheading jumps to telling you FLOPs which is another attempt at summarizing the capabilities of the chip quickly. Once you have the info that it's large and fast the body serves to provide the detailed context. From that view the title serves to identify the primary context well - a very complex chip, come read more about it.

One basic thing I didn't see in the body was power consumption though, anyone know more details on that?

Where is this Ted talk? I couldn’t find it

I don’t believe 7nm used EUVL, which would keep the cost down, relatively speaking.

An extremely deep question...

Density is partly a function of the type of circuit. Memory is denser than random logic, for instance. Interconnect eats a lot of area and reduces density.

This chip is largely memory and multipliers, both of which are pretty dense.

Fab processes improve over time to have higher density and lower defect rate (which allows bigger chips while getting acceptable yield). So it's not surprising to see a chip on the same node but shipping a year or 2 later (than Ampere) having more transistors.

The same Wikipedia page also states that Jim Keller left Tesla awhile ago.

FSD computer is in over a million cars, btw. It’s still hundreds of thousands, but more like one thousand thousand.

Is that only considering the price per cheap deal they get from TSMC, or also including the cost of d&d?