Nvidia claps back at Elon Musk's 'inaccurate' hardware comparison
Nvidia released a blog post arguing Musk's Tesla Autonomy Investor Day comments were unfair and inaccurate.
A large portion of Monday's Tesla Autonomy Investor Day was spent showing off the company's new-ish (it's been out of development for a year and a half, according to Musk) Full Self-Driving chip and the system into which it has been built. Tesla CEO Elon Musk lavished praise on the chip design and compared it with Nvidia's Drive Xavier system. Nvidia doesn't seem to be especially thrilled with that.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, Nvidia called out Musk's comments as being inaccurate and maybe slightly unfair. The comments to which Nvidia refers involved the dual-chip Tesla system and its ability to perform 144 trillion operations per second (TOPS); Musk said it far outperformed Drive Xavier's 30 TOPS.
Nvidia replied by pointing out that Drive Xavier is a single chip system designed to power advanced driver assistance systems and not fully autonomous cars. Nvidia also noted that a more apt comparison would be to its dual-chip Drive AGX Pegasus system, which it says operates at 320 TOPS.
Now, the ability to perform hundreds of trillions of operations per second is only one piece of the puzzle, and it's one on which Tesla and its ex-hardware partner agree. The big difference between the two is that Tesla is already installing its FSD hardware into all of its production vehicles and it's unclear whether Nvidia's Pegasus hardware is still only being used in test vehicles.
Nvidia didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
