Luna loved it. And I had a fun flashback to a piece I wrote for WIRED about the value of peering into the black boxes of our world.
Given all the talk of automotive semiconductor shortages, I curious to investigate the Tesla Autopilot module to which we have trusted our lives these past years. Here is a peek into the Model 3 HW2.5 module, from VIN0005.
What we found: A magic box with liquid cooling tubes dripping a blue fluid. Inside are two circuit boards with thermal paste (grey and pink) connecting the processors on each board to the metal cooling plate that runs through the center.
Tesla designed a custom liquid-cooled dual-computing platform with the Autopilot ECU and Infotainment MCU on two boards in the same module.
There are two Nvidia Parker SoCs, one Nvidia Pascal GPU and one Infineon TriCore CPU. The autopilot ECU board has 4,681 components. It also has an Intel Atom processor, NXP and Infineon for the microcontrollers, Micron Technology, Samsung and SK Hynix memory and STMicroelectronics audio amplifiers.
For the circuit boards, I’ll add descriptions of major parts, and feel free to add more part IDs to them.
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