Jim Keller becomes Tesla's VP of Autopilot Hardware Engineering

[HEXUS]

Tesla Motors move has been confirmed in a statement by the company.

Read more.

[Tabbykatze]

Wow, that's super interesting. Will Tesla be giving the massive middle finger to the likes of Nvidia and build their own purpose built autopilot hardware?

[DR]

Exciting news

[DanceswithUnix]

Wow, that's super interesting. Will Tesla be giving the massive middle finger to the likes of Nvidia and build their own purpose built autopilot hardware?

Given the number of processors in a modern car, there could be some advantage to going fully custom. If they sell 100K cars, and put 10 identical CPUs in each car, that could get the sort of yearly figures that justify a fully custom ASIC but not a custom CPU core just an off the shelf A72 or similar.

Or, given how stagnant CPU design seems to have become and how long Jim has been doing it, perhaps this is nothing to do with CPU/ASIC design it is just an interesting engineering team to lead and he fancies a change. He must have been doing more team leadership than detail engineering for years now?

[crossy]

Luddite hat on ...

The thought of "autopilot" in cars fills me with feelings of dread. And, yes, I'm not a fan of the other "self-driving" car projects either. However, if someone wants to use that tech to make driving safer (like the current collision avoidance tech) then I'd welcome that.

Heck, I don't even like automatic gearboxes!

[DR]

Currently it uses NVIDIA Tegra - does this mean that they will have a custom design? More opitimized - also don't forget they could build and license something out, or identify a more efficient way to manage things like LIDAR and RADAR

[DanceswithUnix]

Nick Farrell seems to think his new job does not involve working on microprocessors: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/process...tches-to-tesla

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,Nvidia lost their Audi contract too.

[scaryjim]

"bring together the best internal and external hardware technologies..." sounds more like he'll be working on the integration of sensors and processing rather than on custom microprocessors. There must be all sorts of interesting hardware challenges with autopilot systems (reduction of latency occurs to me as a key one).

[Sumanji]

The thought of "autopilot" in cars fills me with feelings of dread...

Yup. I am basically Will Smith in iRobot

http://www.technologyreview.com/view...ammed-to-kill/

"From my cold dead hands", tbmfh!