AMD will power Tesla’s upcoming in-car gaming console

AMD just announced that its Ryzen and RDNA 2 technology would power Tesla's 10 teraflop gaming and infotainment system, currently being installed in vehicles on the assembly line.

In 2020, Elon Musk tweeted out a quick poll: "Want to play The Witcher game on your Tesla?"

Of course, Elon Musk tweets a lot of things. How are you supposed to know which tweets to take seriously? It turns out this was for real.

During a keynote presentation at Monday's Taiwan Computex showcase, the chipmaker's CEO Lisa Su announced that an AMD Ryzen CPU paired with an AMD RDNA 2 GPU will power the gaming consoles in the Tesla Model S and Model X.

"So we actually have an AMD Ryzen APU powering the infotainment system in both cars as well as a discrete RDNA 2-based GPU that kicks in when running AAA games, providing up to 10 teraflops of compute power," Su said in her keynote speech, according to The Verge.

That's the same AMD technology that powers the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X S. While that 10 teraflops matches the Sony Playstation 5's claims, the fact that it's "total compute power" means it includes the integrated and discrete GPUs. This means it'll likely perform slightly below the PS5 when you give up the steering wheel for the controller.

"We look forward to giving gamers a great platform for AAA gaming" in the new Teslas, Su added.

Musk recently tweeted deliveries of the Model S Plaid, which will include the new gaming console, will start June 10. "This car feels like a spaceship," he added. "Words cannot describe the limbic resonance."

AMD's Ryzen chips are making great strides lately. Just in March, AMD unveiled its Ryzen 5000 Pro chips for business laptops. The company claimed its mobile CPUs would even outperform Intel's 11th-generation "Tiger Lake" vPro processors.