Tesla showed the computer at the Hot Chips conference. Designing your own chips is hard. But Tesla, one of the most aggressive developers of autonomous vehicle technology, thinks it's worth it. The company shared details Tuesday about how it fine-tuned the design of its AI chips so two of them are smart enough to power its cars' upcoming "full self-driving" abilities. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and his colleagues revealed the company's third-generation computing hardware in April.

Nvidia's current Pascal GPUs are generating a lot of enthusiasm, but their successor, the Volta GPU architecture, is on its way next year, and there's a lot to be excited about. Nvidia unveiled Volta in a new Xavier supercomputer chip designed for self-driving cars, with the small surprising coming Wednesday at the company's GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam. Xavier provides unprecedented computing horsepower, allowing cars to recognize images, analyze on-road situations, and take action. Much of the processing will happen on an integrated 512-core Volta GPU. Xavier will power the successor to Nvidia's current self-driving car computer called Drive PX 2. It has dual 8K HDR video recording capabilities, suggesting the new GPU architecture will explore areas beyond 4K graphics.