2022年9月14日

2017年11月28日，在美國加利福尼亞州舊金山，通用汽車自動駕駛部門Cruise展示其自動駕駛汽車的媒體活動中，人們看到了一輛通用Bolt EV自動駕駛汽車。通用汽車(General Motors)的自動駕駛部門Cruise的高管周二表示，他們已經為自動駕駛汽車開發了自己的芯片，將在2025年之前投入使用，目的是降低成本並擴大產量。克魯斯借鑒了特斯拉的做法，從英偉達的產品轉向定製芯片，為特斯拉的汽車提供動力。Cruise硬件部門主管Carl Jenkins對路透表示:"兩年前，我們花了很多錢從一家知名供應商那裏購買一款GPU。"他指的顯然是領先的圖形處理器製造商英偉達。“沒有談判的餘地，因為我們的銷量很小。我們根本無法協商。這就是為什麼我說，好吧，我們必須掌握自己的命運，”他在參觀舊金山克魯斯研發工作室時說。本周，克魯斯的高管首次透露了其定製芯片的細節，該芯片將為Origin汽車提供動力，但沒有踏板和方向盤。Jenkins表示，內部芯片開發需要投資，但可以通過擴大使用多芯片的汽車產量來收回投資。他拒絕透露該公司在該項目上的投資金額。 Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said on Monday the custom chips would help the Origin "hit that sweet spot from a cost perspective" in 2025 and personal ownership of autonomous vehicles would be viable from then on. That follows comments by GM CEO Mary Barra earlier this year that they would develop a "personal autonomous vehicle" by mid-decade. Cruise had developed four in-house chips so far - a computing chip called Horta, the main brains of the car, Dune which processes data from the sensors, a chip for the radar, and one that it would announce later, Jenkins said. The sensors and computing chips would also reduce power consumption, helping to increase driving range. Gaurav Gupta, a chip analyst at Gartner, said automakers were increasingly trying to design chips and systems in-house to have greater control over product development and supply chains. "Will they be successful or not is a different question as it isn't easy," he said. Ann Gui, Cruise's silicon lead, said the Horta chip was based on an ARM processor as that was what was available when chip development started two years ago. "But we are closely looking at RISC-V because they're open source and it has a lot of benefits," she said. ARM and RISC-V are rival instruction set architectures, a base for building chips that defines what kind of software can run on the chips. Gui said the carmaker was working with an unidentified chip maker in Asia to produce its custom chips at scale. MEET IBT NEWS FROM BELOW CHANNELS © Copyright Thomson Reuters 2022. All rights reserved. Join the Discussion