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An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

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Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw transistor count isn't the same as density.

Sure, but if you look at the raw transistor count of a series of similarly sized dies (take Apple's A series for example), it holds up. It only doesn't hold up if you look at Intel the last 5 years. If you look at series' made on TSMC or Samsung, it holds up.

If you look at CPU performance relative to density as it has progressed over the last few decades, there's a clear decline in speed improvement. Denser only means faster to a point, regardless of Intel's process update failures.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#62
post #2

Now assume that Moore's law stays healthy and in a few decades we're carrying around dojo-equivalent smart phones. Or implants. What do our apps do with all that compute? Detailed convincing AR, accurate real-time translation, identify almost any object in sight, turing-test passing answering machine. We'll be carrying around neural-net training hardware that is different than the stuff between our ears, often worse…

Predict weather and issue an AR warning where to seek shelter from nearby tornado and a passing heat dome, all sponsored by your telecom and facilitated by facebook, of course.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#63

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

> i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying?

Elon is jealous of Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics released an impressive video this week [1], which took the spotlight away from Tesla.

[1] https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a fictional product at this point. Even if the hardware existed, if you can't program it, it won't succeed.

In their presentation yesterday they made it clear that they have a full software stack for programming it. I don't know what is marketing hype and what is real, but they suggested it is very easy for them to program for it.

Every hardware vendor ever says that. It's probably true for the people that built the software stack. Whether it is true for third parties is TBD.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#65

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

Maybe they plan to get investors on "the hardware is great, it's only the software that has to be finished" just as with FSD.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#67

i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible? i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects. its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting f…

>is it even plausible?

The last commercial anthropomorphic was the Willow Garage PR2 back in 2010. It weighed 600 pounds, and had a wheeled base. Each arm had a max payload of 4 pounds. It cost $250,000. The company went bankrupt because there wasn't anything you could do with it.

The tesla bot is supposed to be bipedal, only weigh 125 pounds, and have a "arm extend lift" of 10 lbs. Is that per arm, or both together? Even BD Atlas weighs 196 pounds, and it doesn't have hands!

Like, any one of their numbers would be exceptional. All together, and you are definitely sacrificing something. Either onboard compute is minimal, or it has a battery life measured in dozens of minutes. Something.

They claim a deadlift of 150 lbs. I don't want to say "impossible!", but... difficult? Just holding 150 lbs with any of the robotic hands you can buy on the market today would be hard or impossible.

None of the five finger hands today are as compact as shown in the concept renders. If it does ship with a five finger hand, (stupid, pointlessly expensive) the forearms would be far bulkier. An easy bet is that the first gen will ship with a three finger gripper.

That is, if it even ships at all. BD Handle is a much better design for a humanoid-ish industrial robot. It's going to be simpler, faster and lighter for the same payload as this hypothetical Tesla bot.

Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#68
post #37

Taking everything at face value: Dojo is overall a very impressive project! - Communication speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks to large models, so their bandwidth of 4TBps is very smart. - They claim a 1.3x perf/watt improvement, which is not really that great for ASICs compared to GPUs. Perf/watt is probably the most important number in datacenters. - They only use SRAM, no DRAM. This is a huge mistake, which l…

Yeah, a lot of that probably doesn't matter for Tesla's current internal use case but all of it matters when you're talking about commercializing it.

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Re: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

#70
post #37

Taking everything at face value: Dojo is overall a very impressive project! - Communication speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks to large models, so their bandwidth of 4TBps is very smart. - They claim a 1.3x perf/watt improvement, which is not really that great for ASICs compared to GPUs. Perf/watt is probably the most important number in datacenters. - They only use SRAM, no DRAM. This is a huge mistake, which l…

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