Still remember when Musk claimed during the showcasing of the latest Model X and Model S that drivers will get to play the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on the center console of their Teslas? Musk’s promise has now been fulfilled by AMD, as Lisa Su formally announced that AMD chips will serve as the core architecture of Tesla’s infotainment system.
Of the various online events taking place as part of COMPUTEX 2021, the most anticipated was undoubtedly AMD’s announcement, during which the company not only introduced its brand-new processor architecture and new video cards, but also revealed the fact that the infotainment system contained within next-gen Tesla models will be powered by AMD Ryzen CPUs and AMD RDNA 2 GPUs.
On June 1, Elon Musk announced an overhaul of the Model S and a belief that the audio-visual system of the new Model S will serve as the next generation of gaming platform, since its 10 TFLOPs of computing power is more than sufficient to run AAA games. Tesla’s promotional photos at the time showed Witcher 3 running in the center console of the new Model S; needless to say, this became all the rage in the market at the time.
Despite the belief of many that Musk is 90% talk and 10% substance, he was anything but lying this time. “So we actually have an AMD Ryzen APU powering the infotainment system in both cars as well as a discrete RDNA2-based GPU that kicks in when running AAA games, providing up to 10 teraflops of compute power,” says AMD CEO Lisa Su, who is keen on players gaming on the best platforms, especially for AAA games that need to be played with the highest graphical settings.
Granted, “10 teraflops” sounds relatively abstract, but judging by the architecture revealed by AMD so far, it appears likely that the Model S/X will post gaming performances rivaling those of the PS5.
Additionally, Musk indicated that the AMD-equipped Model S Plaid was to be delivered on June 10. Now that this model is armed with a new gaming weapon in addition to its already impressive acceleration, those willing to spend US$80,000 on a PS5 counterpart that can go from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds flat now have an outlet for doing so.
(Image: Tesla)