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The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

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Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#101

Post by solidasparagus »

justapassenger wrote: post #25

> Of this competition, only Google and Nvidia have supercomputers that stand toe to toe with the Tesla’s Even assuming that it's true (which I very much doubt - anyone that's willing to spend enough money with Nvidia, can have powerful supercomputer fairly quickly), it's very dishonest statement. It's comparing deployed system with a lab prototype of a single competent of potential supercomputer, that may be fully op…

I assumed they're talking about Tesla's A100 cluster, which is huge - https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/06/22/tesla-av-training-s...

Tesla's compute-to-researcher ratio is definitely rare

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#102

Post by boardwaalk »

danso wrote: post #42

I confess I have a reflexive skepticism to the idea that Tesla's achievements (and struggles) in car manufacturing would translate to any kind of lead in chip design and manufacturing. How long did it take Apple from planning to rollout for M1? And the Tesla chip seems to be making bigger revolution-sized claims?

Tesla is already shipping their own chips in every car. And that’s a better comparison (it’s an end user thing you can buy) than this data center processor. It’s hard to compare vs, say, Nvidia’s car computers because it’s all locked down. But I believe the energy efficiency is fairly good.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#103

Post by fanf2 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

The London Docklands Light Railway (DLR) has had fully automatic running since 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#104

Post by fanf2 »

hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #67
samstave wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions... Which networking protocol best maps to this? And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection... I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campus…

For the most part the MAC just looks for another signal on the wire (another train on the same section of rail) and when it looks clear, starts transmitting (driving). As you can imagine, there will be cases when 2 MACs start talking at the same time, at which point they detect the collision, wait a random delay and try again. I wouldn’t want to be on that train, I’d prefer plain old serial with hardware flow control

Ethernet has not worked like that since the 1990s.

Even WiFi avoids relying on collision detection by routing client-to-client traffic via the AP instead of being peer-to-peer.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#105

Post by dimitrios1 »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #75
dimitrios1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, requires a sane society that gathers around and does whats best for the collective whole. What we have, however, is a kleoptocracy, and being as such, the opportunity to extract more wealth, faster, and easier, existed with selling the promise of autonomous vehicles. If the same incentives existed for autonomous rail, it would have happened already.

Let’s not be so cynical here. No amount of mustache-twirling evil robber barons would change the fact that for any nationwide rail system to be useful at a last mile, billions (if not trillions, if we’re talking coast to coast) of dollars of existing real estate and infrastructure would have to be bulldozed, or else you end up with California’s joke of a Central Valley rail that will never connect Los Angeles to San…

> existing real estate and infrastructure would have to be bulldozed,

You mean like they've done with every beltway and interstate? They claim eminent domain, take whatever strip of land they need from you, and bulldoze anything in it's path to build nice fancy exits full of the same features: a few hotels/motels, gas stations, couple of fast food chains, and, perhaps, if you are fancy enough, a strip mall with a Department store, Sporting Goods, and a fine dining establishment from one of America's most recognized brands: Bloomin' or Darden

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#107

Post by _nalply »

My curiosity got piqued at the mention of CFP8 (configurable floating point 8), but googling this didn't yield usable information.

What exactly is CFP8? How many bits does one instance of CFP8 use? What mathematical operations are supported? How does one configure the floating point?

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#108

Post by _nalply »

_nalply wrote: post #107

My curiosity got piqued at the mention of CFP8 (configurable floating point 8), but googling this didn't yield usable information. What exactly is CFP8? How many bits does one instance of CFP8 use? What mathematical operations are supported? How does one configure the floating point?

I found about posits.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/04/11/anatomy-of-a-posit...

Perhaps CFP8 are parameterized 8-bit posits where the parameter is the value es. The larger es is, the greater the dynamic range is at the expense of precision. Two examples:

posit (es = 0) has as largest positive number 64 and the smallest positive number 1/64.

posit (es = 1) has as largest positive number 4012 and the smallest positive number 1/4012.

The formula for the largest positive number for 8-bit posits is:

2 ^ 2 ^ es ^ 6.

posits don't have NaNs and only one infinity (±∞), so they can use more of the 8 bit values for numbers than floating point numbers.

I wonder: is CFP8 = posites>?

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#109

Post by Nexxius »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #75
dimitrios1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, requires a sane society that gathers around and does whats best for the collective whole. What we have, however, is a kleoptocracy, and being as such, the opportunity to extract more wealth, faster, and easier, existed with selling the promise of autonomous vehicles. If the same incentives existed for autonomous rail, it would have happened already.

Let’s not be so cynical here. No amount of mustache-twirling evil robber barons would change the fact that for any nationwide rail system to be useful at a last mile, billions (if not trillions, if we’re talking coast to coast) of dollars of existing real estate and infrastructure would have to be bulldozed, or else you end up with California’s joke of a Central Valley rail that will never connect Los Angeles to San…

There was a push for something like that and it would have been great...it fell afoul of NIMBY and Toll road haters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Texas_Corridor Everyone in Austin hated SH-45 & 130 when they were built, they were practically empty for a few years to my delight as I could travel the entirety of Austin in a fraction of the normal time even during rush hours. After MOPAC was added residents began to see the light and the tollways are now congested. Many are regretting their opposition to Perry's lost/last road project but, that train has left the station unless Elon can get the Boring project going or Virgin is able to implement their version of Hyperloop. Hell, I'd have settled for elevated wire gondolas over the roads, works well enough for Australia.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#110

Post by plutonorm »

LightG wrote: post #30
plutonorm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So happy to meet someone else who gets it on hacker news.

What I get is Tesla selling a pipe-dream "next year" that may take a decade or two to solve. FSD is a novelty at best right now (cruise control is handy), and a con at worst.

I didn’t comment on the sales strategy, just the the technical approach. The technical approach is correct - the marketing is dodgy. But then again this is how the game of hyper capitalism is played.
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