AMD Moves Intel To Embed Chipset In Tesla's Car Entertainment System

JAKARTA - The chipset company AMD has reportedly won the deal and will become a supporter of infotainment technology in Tesla's electric cars. Previous rumors, AMD will provide graphics hardware or chipset in the car made by Elon Musk.

At the Computex 2021 event, AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed the rumors. He explained that the new Tesla will feature an AMD APU (Ryzen chip with built-in Radeon graphics) in their infotainment system.

Since last January, Tesla announced the upgraded Model S and Model X, there's no reason to say that its new infotainment system will offer up to 10 teraflops of power. Possibly, AMD will be pinned on the car.

Tesla electric car. (Unsplash/Martin Katler)

Quoting Fortune, Tuesday June 1, that makes sense, as the company's RDNA 2 GPU is also behind the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Su notes that the RDNA 2 graphics will work when the user is playing something that requires a lot of power. Similar to the way some laptops juggle integrated and discrete graphics cards.

"The fact is that the technology we developed for PCs is now entering the automotive world," said Su.

The contract with Tesla adds to AMD's momentum after three years of gains in the computing market. As a supplier to one of the busiest US companies, AMD has yet another win over its rivals.

On the other hand, the company doesn't want to drain the user's battery life by keeping the high-powered GPU active all the time.

The updated Tesla also features two infotainment screens like a 17-inch screen up front, and a smaller one at the back for passengers.

So if the driver doesn't have much time to play, there's a good chance the people in the back seat will. Honestly, decent graphics power like that can be pinned on a car that has a price of 74,000 US dollars or equivalent to Rp. 1.05 billion.

It is known, the victory over AMD replaces Intel, which has supplied chips for the infotainment system in the previous Model S and X versions. However, other Tesla cars—the Model 3 and Y—will continue to be equipped by Intel.