This is seemingly quite a different technical skill set to have than his previous position. I'm curious as to whether Tesla wants to also transition to swift for automotive code, or whether Chris Lattner was already involved in apple's car project (project titan).
Either way, a big win for Tesla and quite a loss for Apple.
Tesla's AP is seemingly built ontop of Nvidia hardware, which is programmed using CUDA. CUDA is built ontop of LLVM, which Chris Lattner created. Seems like an obvious fit if you look at it from a purely technology perspective.
No way is it a leap. Lots of people are doing stuff to llvm to do gpu work. Take mapd for instance. There is a LOT of untapped llvm -> gpu goodness to be had.
Great - maybe he can introduce a new programming language and/or associated tooling to the automotive world. It's quite depressing that all those systems are still built with a subset of C/C++. And often even not the safest subset, when I think about the dozens of variants of custom memory management that I have already seen implemented - with possibilites for OOM everywhere.
Either way, a big win for Tesla and quite a loss for Apple.