Posted on Wednesday, September 20 2017 @ 22:24 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Globalfoundries says it has no commitment from Tesla, comments were misinterpreted
Tesla is currently using NVIDIA's chips to power its self-driving car platform but this cooperation could come to an end as the electric car pioneer is rumored to be working on a chip of its own. CNBC heard from a source that Tesla received back samples of a prototype of its in-house processor. Tesla is now running tests on the samples.
Over 50 people are working on this project over at Tesla and this initiative is headed by Jim Keller, who joined Tesla in early 2016 after playing a major role in the development of AMD's Zen architecture.
Keller is the head of Autopilot hardware and software unit and the self-driving car chip from Tesla is reportedly build on top of AMD intellectual property. The extent of AMD's role in the development of this chip is unknown but it looks like the company scored a licensing deal rather than a semi-custom chip order.
Production seems to be taken care off by GlobalFoundries as Sanjay Jha, CEO of the foundry, revealed at the company's technology conference in Santa Clara, California, that GlobalFoundries is working directly with Tesla.
