Wednesday, September 20, 2017

NVIDIA Partner Tesla Reportedly Developing Chip With AMD (TSLA; NVDA; AMD)

Today in leveraged WTFs....

From CNBC:
Tesla is working with AMD to develop its own A.I. chip for self-driving cars, says source
  • Tesla is working with AMD to refine its new chip, which will likely reduce its reliance on Nvidia.
  • GlobalFoundries CEO Sanjay Jha said it's working with Tesla on a chip.
  • Tesla has more than 50 employees involved in the project, including chip star Jim Keller.
Tesla is getting closer to having its own chip for handling autonomous driving tasks in its cars.
The carmaker has received back samples of the first implementation of its processor and is now running tests on it, said a source familiar with the matter.

The effort to build its own chip is in line with Tesla's push to be vertically integrated and decrease reliance on other companies.

But Tesla isn't completely going it alone in chip development, according to the source, and will build on top of AMD intellectual property.

AMD shares spiked after CNBC reported that the company is working with Tesla. Shares of the stock ended the day nearly 5 percent higher and continued to climb after hours.

On Wednesday Sanjay Jha, CEO of AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries, said at the company's technology conference in Santa Clara, California, that the company is working directly with Tesla. GlobalFoundries, which fabricates chips, has a wafer supply agreement in place with AMD through 2020.

A more power-efficient purpose-built chip could help Tesla get closer to delivering totally autonomous driving. Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised this year that capability will be available to consumers in 2019....MORE
HT: The Verge

The reason for the incredulous intro line:
Featured Automotive Partners
TESLA
Tesla Motors and NVIDIA have partnered since the early development of the revolutionary Model S. Today, all Tesla vehicles—Model S, Model X, and the upcoming Model 3—will be equipped with an NVIDIA-powered on-board "supercomputer" that can provide full self-driving capability....

Automotive Partners
VW

NVIDIA is always careful to use "Tesla Motors" in press releases to distinguish from their own line of Tesla GPUs, e.g.

Tesla Motors’ Self-Driving Car “Supercomputer” Powered by NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 Technology
 so again, huh?