Chip Measuring Contest:The benefits of purpose-built chips

摘要

Alan Kay once said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." We are now seeing product companies genuinely live up to this value. On August 19, 2021, Tesla showed off Dojo, its new chip used for training neural networks. You might imagine the lead of an article about this something along the lines of, "A company that is not in the business of making chips, made its own chip for its own specific use case, wat!" That part of the announcement was not so shocking because it was something seen before with Tesla and its FSD (full self-driving) computer, with Cisco and its network ASICs, and recently with Apple's M1 chip. In reality the shocking part of the Tesla announcement was not their chip but their humanoid robot, but we'll save that for another article.