91–100 of 105 posts
Intel has spent billions of dollars in M&A and in R+D and still has missed ARM Holdings, just acquired by Softbank last summer.
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OK. I've worked on several EVs with 100kW motors. Lets do some math. A really good EV takes around 200 to 250 watt-hours per mile. On the EPA urban drive cycle you average just under 20 miles per hour. If you have 100 miles range, that will take around 5 hours in urban driving. A 40 watt load for 5 hours is 200 watt-hours. Your Intel processor running near 100 watts is going to cost you 2.5 percent of the range. Or i…
Let's look at it a different way. The MacBook battery is 55 watt-hours, the Tesla battery is 100 thousand watt hours. They both run their respective workloads for a similar amount of time. So, less than a tenth of a percent?
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Let's look at it a different way. The MacBook battery is 55 watt-hours, the Tesla battery is 100 thousand watt hours. They both run their respective workloads for a similar amount of time. So, less than a tenth of a percent?
Don't confuse watts with watt-hours. My math stands.
I can get an off-the-shelf Xeon-D 8-core processor that runs at 35W and any single core would STOMP every ARM chip on the market. If I were to build that chip specifically for a car platform my power envelope would drop accordingly.
https://ark.intel.com/products/family/87041/Intel-Xeon-Proce...
This is an embedded application... not a gaming computer. If I move to Atom - which is what would likely be used for this sort of thing, you're talking less than 5W.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microproces...
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Autopilot is floundering in the absence of Mobileye. It will take Tesla a while before their much more expensive hardware suite with 8 cameras and a Px drive chip (just the chip is worth a few thousand dollars) can match the performance of Mobileye's EyeQ3 and single camera.
Tesla would have been stuck at level 2/3 with Mobileye. With PX2 you have enough compute power to do much more, and a mature and rapidly developing GPGPU ecosystem (CUDA for ML, SLAM, SfM etc). I do think Nvidia is going to have to bring the price of PX2 down significantly though if they want mass market adoption.
You couldn't train a good autonomous driving agent even if you used a massive GPU cluster.
I'm not saying better hardware doesn't help, it definitely helps incrementally but it's not going to be enough to solve this problem.
Intel has made acquisitions of almost $40 billion in the past couple of years. It will be interesting to see if they can make this money back as competition becomes more fierce in the PC and server markets because of AMD and Qualcomm.
They have 95%+ marketshare in server chips. They have an enormous manufacturing advantage. Even though they charge so much for their chips if they feel threatened by Ryzen they can just lower the price of their chips to Ryzen prices because they have a manufacturing advantage. It will just hurt their margins. 40-50% margins forever seem pretty absurd from a pure economics perspective.
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Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that.
>> Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. I completely agree. >> Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that. But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and…
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In the same way that the government pays for part of your salary?
More like tax credits. For example you can buy an EV and knock some money off your taxes. For example supposed a company makes 5 billion they have a 30% tax rate. They would owe 1.5 billion. Supposed they bought a company for 6 billion. They realized next year hey the company is really only worth $1 billion. They write off the 5 billion which offsets the 5 billion profits so instead of the paying 1.5 billion in taxes…
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Tesla would have been stuck at level 2/3 with Mobileye. With PX2 you have enough compute power to do much more, and a mature and rapidly developing GPGPU ecosystem (CUDA for ML, SLAM, SfM etc). I do think Nvidia is going to have to bring the price of PX2 down significantly though if they want mass market adoption.
Autonomous driving is a software engineering/research problem, not a hardware bottleneck. You couldn't train a good autonomous driving agent even if you used a massive GPU cluster. I'm not saying better hardware doesn't help, it definitely helps incrementally but it's not going to be enough to solve this problem.
However I'd wager to say that betting on a powerful Nvidia GPU/chipset (piggybacking on general ML/CUDA ecosystem progress) to be able process rapidly advancing autonomous driving algorithms is a more future proof bet for Tesla than relying on already outdated hardware/algorithms from Mobileye.
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Don't confuse watts with watt-hours. My math stands.
Why would you assume they'd be using a CPU running at 100W??? I can get an off-the-shelf Xeon-D 8-core processor that runs at 35W and any single core would STOMP every ARM chip on the market. If I were to build that chip specifically for a car platform my power envelope would drop accordingly. https://ark.intel.com/products/family/87041/Intel-Xeon-Proce... This is an embedded application... not a gaming computer. If…
Correct. But Atom processors performance are no better than the competition and don't currently have any of the common automotive peripherals (CAN for example).
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Why would you assume they'd be using a CPU running at 100W??? I can get an off-the-shelf Xeon-D 8-core processor that runs at 35W and any single core would STOMP every ARM chip on the market. If I were to build that chip specifically for a car platform my power envelope would drop accordingly. https://ark.intel.com/products/family/87041/Intel-Xeon-Proce... This is an embedded application... not a gaming computer. If…
>> This is an embedded application... not a gaming computer. If I move to Atom - which is what would likely be used for this sort of thing, you're talking less than 5W. Correct. But Atom processors performance are no better than the competition and don't currently have any of the common automotive peripherals (CAN for example).
Regardless, you're missing the point. Intel has the means to get into the space and create appropriate CPUs to compete. This acquisition makes it clear they're planning on doing just that.