is everyone designing their own silicon getting so much additional them-specific utility out of it that it's actually worth it?
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Yea, Tesla has some. But they aren't sharing their secret sauce. You can't just throw a desktop computer in a car and expect it to survive for the duration. Ford et all aren't anywhere close to having "premium silicon".
So you're only option right now is to build your own. And hope maybe that you can sell/license your designs to others later and make bucks.
They are all expensive, but less than the risk adjusted cost of developing a chip.
And their chips give "1600 sparse INT8 TOPS" vs the Orin's "more than 1,000 INT8 TOPS" -- so comparable enough? And going forward they can tailor it to exactly what they want?
NVIDIA also tailor their chips to customers. It's a more scalable platform than their marketing hints at... Not to mention that they also iterate fairly quickly.
So far anyway, being on a specialised architecture is a disadvantage; it's much easier to use the advances that come from research and competitors. Unless you really think that you are ahead of the completion, and can sell some fairly inflexible solution for a while.
I've been involved with similar efforts on both sides before. Making your own hardware is not a clear cut win even if you hit timelines and performance. I wish them luck (not least because I might need a new job someday), but this is an incredibly difficult space.