Elon Musk Claims New RDNA2-Powered Tesla Infotainment System On Par With PlayStation 5

Elon Musk, Bitcoin aficionado and CEO of Tesla, recently held the launch for his company’s latest car, the Model S Plaid. As you’d expect, the electric vehicle is loaded with the latest state-of-the-art technology on the current market, the most important piece of technology for us perhaps being its new and improved infotainment system.

Specifically, the Model S Plaid’s infotainment system is powered by AMD’s Navi 23, a GPU that was initially rumoured to make its debut with the parent company’s alleged Radeon RX 6600 GPU series. To that end, the launch marked the first time the GPU’s power was being demonstrated and during a non-AMD keynote to boot.

Details of Navi 23 is still scarce but from what we know, the GPU is expected to have up to 2048 Stream Processors and support up to 8GB GDDR6 graphic memory on both the RX 6600XT and RX 6600. As for its performance, Musk went as far as to say his car’s infotainment system was as powerful as a Sony PlayStation 5 (PS5).

That wasn’t an empty boast either; putting his money where his mouth is, Musk gave a live demonstration of his car’s Navi 23-powered infotainment system running Cyberpunk 2077 with the console’s 17-inch display as the output and at its maximum resolution of 2200 x 1300 pixels.

Intel Xe HPG Performance Supposedly On Par With NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Intel has been keeping the lid tightly shut on all matters Xe related. The last time we heard anything about the chipmaker’s first discrete GPU was back in February, when Raja Koduri, its Chief Architect for Graphics, hinted at the Xe-HPG capabilities and its support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.

Fast forward to today and word on the wire is that we could be looking at a discrete GPU with performance on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070, if his recent tweet is anything to go by. Breaking it down, Koduri’s tweet shows two pictures from different time periods at Intel’s Folsom Lab. The takeaway here is the last bit of his tweet, where he proclaims that he is playing with a GPU that is approximately “20x faster” than a pre-production Crystal Well.

For those unfamiliar with that name, Crystal Well is what we know now as Intel’s Haswell CPU lineup; back then, the lineup’s integrated graphics was known as the Iris Pro 5200, which in turn was a part of the top-of-the-line CPU at the time, the Core i7-4770K.

While it may seem like Koduri is merely making a passing remark about Xe-HPG, there is actually some truth behind it. Thanks to PC World, we know that the Iris Pro 5200 had a UL Fire Strike’s graphics score of 1450 points. Multiply that by 20, and the number you’re looking at is 29000 points; that’s more or less on the level of the aforementioned RTX 3070.

That said, Koduri’s tweet is still, nevertheless, cryptic, and much of what we’ve talked about is still unconfirmed and mere speculation of what we can expect from Intel’s Xe HPG. So, until an official announcement by Intel, take this news with a large grain of salt.