That’s according to senior semiconductor analyst Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons, who outlined his view of things to come at a conference this week in London.

Penn, a man with 30 years experience in the semiconductor industry, and who has run a fabrication plant (fab) in his time, said Nvidia’s GPU is image driven, distinguishing it from the rest of the pack.

That will be pretty important when automatic cars get off the “vision thing” and onto what you and I call roads, reckons Penn.

He said that future cars will be both about integrated circuits (ICs) and system software.

Tesla - both the car company and Nvidia’s GPU - will be integral to autonomous cars, said Penn.

There are obviously road blocks on the way. But, he explained, quoting scientists: “Half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision.” That means Von Neumann architectures suck when it comes to image processing. Von Neumann architectures include, of course, Chipzilla's X86 architecture.

Tesla - that’s Nvidia’s Tesla - is built on an architecture that takes all of this into account. So it’s Tesla Tesla all the way, apart from the fact that the leather-clad CEO is being sought after by car companies  far and wide.