Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the morning of September 14, Beijing time, it is reported that Cruise, the self-driving unit of General Motors, has begun to develop its own chip for self-driving cars, which is expected to be deployed in 2025.

On Tuesday, local time, the company's executives said its goal was to drive down vehicle costs and increase production. At present, Cruise is copying Tesla's path, gradually abandoning Nvidia's chips and starting to produce its own custom chips to power its vehicles.

Carl Jenkins, head of hardware at Cruise, said: "two years ago, we paid a lot of money to a famous CPU supplier." Obviously, he was referring to the graphics processing unit, Nvidia, the leading supplier of GPU. "because of our small demand, we don't have the ability to negotiate a price with each other," he said during a media tour of Cruise's research and development centre in San Francisco. "it's impossible for us to negotiate a price. So we decided that we needed to take control of our own destiny."

Cruise executives revealed for the first time this week details of its custom chips that will power Origin self-driving vehicles without human driver controls such as pedals or steering wheels.

Jenkins said that the development of internal chips requires a lot of investment, but expanding the scale of vehicle production will help make up for those investments. He declined to say how much the company would invest in the project.

Kyle Vogt, chief executive of Cruise, had previously said the custom chips would help Origin significantly reduce costs in 2025, adding that from then on, individuals would be able to buy self-driving cars. Earlier this year, GM CEO Mary Barra said it would develop a "personal self-driving car" by the middle of the decade.

So far, Cruise has developed four internal chips, including a computing chip called Horta, which will act as the main brain of the vehicle. Dune is responsible for processing data from sensors, a chip for radar, and another that it will announce later.

These sensors and computing chips will also reduce power consumption and help increase the mileage of these electric vehicles.

Gaurav Gupta, an Gartner chip analyst, says carmakers are increasingly trying to design chips and systems internally to have more control over product development and the supply chain. "but it is not an easy task, so whether they can succeed is still a difficult question to answer," he said. "

Ann Gui, head of chips at Cruise, revealed that the Horta chip is an ARM-based processor because it was already available when the chip was developed two years ago. "but we are also keeping a close eye on RISC-V because they are open source and have a lot of benefits," she said. ARM and RISC-V are competing instruction set architectures, which are the basis of building chips and define what kind of software can be run on the chip. She also revealed that the company was working with an Asian chipmaker to mass produce its custom chips, but she did not disclose the name of the chipmaker.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.