"Magic Kid" George Hotz founded comma.ai, which launched the chestnut external GPU expansion dock on August 12. The standalone unit is priced at $249 (about 1,682 yuan), and the complete kit with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB is sold for $799 (about 5,399 yuan). Hotz became famous at the age of 17 by cracking the iPhone, later cracked the PS3, and in 2016 founded comma.ai, promoting semi-autonomous driving assistance with open-source and affordable hardware.

External eGPU, power consumption limit increased to 100W

chestnut mainly enhances the computing power for comma four, bringing it close to the level of Tesla HW4. The original car system runs the openpilot model with a power consumption of about 10W, but as the model becomes larger, computing power becomes tight; chestnut increases the power consumption limit to around 100W through external connection. The upcoming openpilot 0.11.2 will include the first driving model of chestnut level, with 1B parameters, which is the largest driving model of comma.ai, with 30 times more parameters and 100 times more floating-point computing power than the comma four side.

The company claims that the fleet records nearly 1 million minutes of driving data every day, 15% of which is used for training clusters. chestnut uses a PCIe Gen4 x4 to USB4 bridge, and the control chip firmware is written in C, which has been open-sourced on GitHub by tinygrad. For the affordable intelligent driving circle, this hundred-fold computing power dock means a low-barrier path for large models on the vehicle side.