Tesla Developing its own Self-driving car chip with AMD

Electric car pioneer Tesla is reportedly working with AMD on a chip to power its very own self driving car fleet that CEO Elon Musk promised would be road-ready by 2019. The news came at the heels of the revelation that the company is also developing a new hardware suite with more computing power to help achieve its goal of full automation.

According to a report by CNBC, Tesla and AMD have been working together to develop the autonomous driving chip, a move that would clearly be in line with the recent hiring of ex-AMD executive Jim Keller who took on the duties of Chris Lattner as head of Tesla’s Autopilot hardware engineering effort.

While neither AMD nor Tesla have come out in the open about the partnership, CNBC’s story was later bolstered by comments made by Sanjay Jha, CEO of AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries which is a semiconductor foundry, during one of its conference today that it is working directly with Tesla on producing a chip.

Although Tesla decline to comment on the matter, a spokesperson from Global Foundries made a statement saying, “Sanjay's comments at GLOBALFOUNDRIES' GTC event were not reported accurately. In his presentation, Sanjay simply cited that companies like Apple, Google and Tesla are examples of the types of showing interest in working closely with silicon companies to differentiate their offerings. Tesla has not committed to working with us on any autonomous driving technology or product.”

Meanwhile, AMD’s arch rival Nvidia has been busy in the self driving market, already working with the likes of Toyota, Audi, Volvo, and several others on its own efforts.