[News-Oxcart Network]
After a fall from the altar, Mobileye, a supplier of smart driving chips, is trying to re-keep up with the team.
At the CES Consumer Electronics Show, Mobileye brought three automotive-grade chips, namely the EyeQ Ultra chip for autonomous driving, and the EyeQ 6L and EyeQ 6H chips for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
The EyeQ Ultra chip can meet all the needs and application scenarios of L4 level autonomous driving. The chip uses a 5-nanometer process, the performance is equivalent to the sum of the performance of 10 previous EyeQ 5, and the computing power reaches 176 TOPS.
Although there is still a lot of gap compared to the 254 computing power of the NVIDIA Orin chip, the EyeQ Ultra and Mobileye software have been co-designed, so that the chip achieves a high energy efficiency ratio without sacrificing performance, while avoiding the additional energy consumption and cost of combining multiple system integration chips, which is better than other autonomous vehicle solutions in terms of energy efficiency ratio.
In addition, the EyeQ Ultra features a design of four proprietary accelerators that, in conjunction with other CPUs, ISPs and GPUs, form an energy-efficient solution capable of simultaneously processing input data from two sensing subsystems as well as the vehicle's central computing system, high-definition maps and driving decision software.
It is reported that the EyeQ Ultra chip is expected to be supplied at the end of 2023, and we will open a model equipped with the chip and a supporting autonomous driving program in 2025.
EyeQ 6L is currently Mobileye's most cost-effective product, able to meet the energy-efficient entry-level and L2-level driver assistance scenarios. As a successor to EyeQ 4, the chip reduces the package size to 55% of EyeQ 4 while bringing higher deep learning hash rate (TOPS) with lower power consumption. The chip is expected to be mass-produced in mid-2023.
Compared with the EyeQ 6L positioning, the EyeQ 6H is more high-end, and can realize the functions of high-end ADAS and partial automatic driving, and achieve L2+ level auxiliary driving functions. The EyeQ 6H and companion solutions enable multi-camera processing, including parking cameras, and support third-party applications such as visual parking and driver monitoring. It is reported that the chip is expected to be mass-produced at the end of 2024.
Comments: At the CES Consumer Show, Mobileye announced that the shipment of EyeQ series chips will exceed 100 million by 2021. Although this is a very impressive number, Mobileye's current situation is not ideal.
Since the past two years, major automakers are abandoning EyeQ chips, and the new domestic car-making forces in Weilai, Xiaopeng, Weima and the ideal next-generation flagship models have adopted NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips, and BMW, Mobileye's largest partner, has also recently announced that it will break up with Mobileye and switch to Qualcomm.
In the face of the pressure of continuous loss of partners, Mobileye had to bring a new generation of chips at this CES show, and the new chip recalculation power has no advantage in facing mainstream competitors, but the high energy efficiency ratio is also regarded as the cornering overtaking of three new EyeQ chips. Will such an attempt bring Mobileye back to the first echelon of self-driving car solutions? We'll see.