Tesla partners with AMD on chip for self-driving car

Tesla is working with AMD on a chip for its self-driving cars, CNBC reports. Fifty employees from Tesla are said to be involved in the project, including CPU architect Jim Keller who worked at AMD for years.

AMD and Tesla have not confirmed the news, but GlobalFoundries said at its conference that Tesla is an example of a company collaborating with one of its partners. AMD is an important partner of GlobalFoundries.

CNBC writes that Tesla has already received samples and is conducting the first tests with the chip resulting from the collaboration with AMD. The American news channel has learned this from a source who is familiar with the developments.

Tesla currently uses Nvidia hardware for its Autopilot software, but Elon Musk’s company is also working on its own hardware. In early 2016, Jim Keller made the switch from AMD to Tesla, where he is vice president of the Hardware Engineering division.

Keller is a prominent CPU architect who worked on the K7 and K8 architectures at AMD in the 1990s. He left the company in 1999 and subsequently worked on the Apple A4 and A5 socs, among others. In 2012, he returned to AMD as Chief Architect of Microprocessor Cores to develop the Zen architecture.