Waymo's custom 5nm ASIC powers its driverless compute, 20x performance in 8 years
A look under our trunk: what's in our compute
Waymo lifts the lid on the compute system behind its autonomous vehicles, revealing a custom 5nm ASIC that delivers over 1,000 TOPS of ML performance for front-end processing. Co-designed with sensors and algorithms, the system achieves 20x performance scaling in eight years while meeting strict requirements for responsiveness, ruggedness, and redundancy. Waymo partners with AMD, NVIDIA, and others to build a heterogeneous, ML-primary architecture that handles the entire driving task without human backup.
Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over.
- xnx
Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory.
They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.
- p-o
They really are the impressive tech, it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight.
I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.
- arjie
Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it.
It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).