While we’ve been enjoying a relaxing Easter weekend, in the States, Tesla has been preparing for its annual Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California. While this event hasn’t been particularly noteworthy in previous years, today’s offered up more information about Tesla’s self-driving car plans.

More specifically the electric carmaker has shown off its first fully fledged self-driving car chip.

It also adds that it’s been shipping said chip in the latest Model S and Model X EVs during the past month, as well as placing them into the Model 3 over the past 10 days.

The chip was showcased in greater detail by Tesla’s Elon Musk, with the CEO also christening it the “best chip in the world” during a live streamed press conference for Autonomy Investor Day.

In terms of specifics for this newly developed silicon, it’s 260 square millimetres, and houses 6 billion transistors, along with boasting a whopping 21 times the performance of the Nvidia chips that Tesla had employed before.

To support such claims Tesla says the twin neural network arrays in their new chip can support up to 36 trillion operations per second each, as well as costing the company 80 percent of what their previous chip of choice costed.

Whether the new full self-driving chip yields the benefits that Tesla is aiming for remains to be seen, or indeed whether the carmaker wants to make it available to some of its manufacturing rivals in the autonomous space.

For now we’ll have to wait and see what Tesla’s greater plan is, but in the interim watch the full self-driving chip in action in the video below.