During his quarterly earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a new piece of hardware that the company is working on to perform all the calculations required to advance the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles.

The specialised chip, known as "Hardware 3" will be "swapped into the Model S, X, and 3”.

This is bad news for Nvidia which has seen Tesla using its Drive platform. Pete Bannon, director of the Hardware 3 project, said that his lot had the benefit of knowing what neural networks looked like, and what they'll look like in the future.

Tesla thinks that you need to run the AI at a bare metal level, although it does not say whether he will be supplying them with metal bears.

Musk said that you have to do these calculations in the circuit itself, not in some sort of emulation mode, which is how a GPU or CPU would operate. Tesla's computer vision software running on Nvidia's hardware was handling about 200 frames per second, its specialised chip is able to crunch out 2,000 frames per second "with full redundancy and failover". 

Of course it also gives Tesla more control over its own future.