Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
The author | James
Edit the | Xiao Han
Apple has made new progress in car building, and even suppliers are almost determined.
Just recently, south Korean media "IT News" published an exclusive news, saying that Apple recently visited a number of south Korean auto parts suppliers to discuss the supply of auto parts. Apple even wants to buy a partial stake in an electronic component manufacturer directly to meet Apple's production capacity needs.
It is clear that Apple's car-making plan is advancing rapidly, and there is news that Apple will debut its self-developed car at this autumn's conference.
According to the cooperation process between Apple and suppliers, this schedule may be more reliable.
Moreover, Apple recently launched an original movie "Swan Elegy", which shows any point-to-point automatic driving, no steering wheel of the vehicle, and the interaction in the car is all based on AR glasses. I don't know whether Apple intentionally or unintentionally leaked its future travel ideas in advance.
Stills from the movie "Swan Elegy"
At the same time, in recent years, Apple has vigorously laid out self-developed chips, and Foxconn, one of its largest suppliers, has laid out the electric vehicle business, which has also made Apple's intelligence and electrification have obvious eyebrows.
It can be said that the prototype of Apple's car has basically been formed, but to form a complete vehicle, it still needs a lot of testing and verification. I believe that in the near future, we will be able to see the true appearance of Apple cars.
First, electronic components: Apple twice went to South Korea Suppliers will be determined
According to south Korean media outlet IT News, in December last year, Apple visited a number of electronic component manufacturers in South Korea to build a car supply chain. In fact, in 2021, Apple traveled to South Korea twice to engage with suppliers in the automotive industry.
Reports published by South Korean media
The report said that Apple plans to complete the selection of vehicle suppliers within this year and enter the comprehensive research and development stage.
After visiting several electronic component manufacturers, Apple showed great interest in its existing mass-produced technology. For one of the electronic component makers, Apple directly proposed that it want to make an equity investment to allow the company to triple its production capacity to meet Apple's supply needs. However, it is unclear whether the electronic component maker accepted Apple's offer.
After face-to-face meetings with electronic component manufacturers, Apple will continue to contact these parts manufacturers through online means.
A head of the parts industry said: "Apple's car-related business is not public, if the information is leaked to the outside world, the company will be removed from the supplier list by Apple, so now all companies are handled very carefully." ”
In addition, some electronic component manufacturers that have been on Apple's supplier list are now gradually setting up special groups to dock Apple's automotive business and dock Apple's automotive projects.
Obviously, Apple's car project is accelerating the layout, and suppliers have already seen the "fat meat" of Apple's car in front of them.
From the perspective of the existing product layout, the two largest Apple suppliers in South Korea are Samsung and LG, which supply a large number of screen and storage components to Apple every year.
In 2021, mini LED technology was mass-produced in the display industry, which is one of the biggest innovations in display technology in recent years. At the same time, LG Display has applied this technology to cars.
Mercedes-Benz EQXX adopts mini LED car machine screen
The Mercedes-Benz EQXX model released this month is equipped with a 47.5-inch mini LED display with more than 5 million pixels in full screen (resolution 7680 * 660), and more than 3000 backlit partitions. After Brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac bring OLED displays into the car, it is only a matter of time before mini LEDs can be mass-produced and put on the car.
At the same time, Apple hopes to create a consistent display effect of the full range of devices, allowing mini LEDs to get on the car one step closer. From apple watch to pro display XDR, they can reach 1000nit full-screen brightness, and there is a wide color gamut of P3 and high contrast.
Therefore, when Apple wants to install a screen car, its display effect should be consistent with the existing equipment.
Obviously, OLED displays perform well on small screens, but the full-screen brightness of large screens is insufficient, and there are problems with short lifespan. The best choice at this stage is mini LED, and the better choice in the future may be micro LED.
However, for products that have not yet been released in the industry, Apple has always taken strict confidentiality measures, and even supplier information will not be published, and the cooperative relationship between suppliers and Apple is very mysterious.
But we were able to find clues in another apple collaboration.
In 2016, Apple once launched a paper book, which is a product launched in the cross-border consumer electronics category. At that time, the manufacturer of OEM printing for Apple was the domestic Artron Group.
Five years after the book's launch, Artron recently published an interview with engineers revealing the process of suppliers and Apple working together, which is very similar to the current Apple auto parts selection.
苹果《Designed by Apple in California》
Yu Juan of Artron's overseas special sales team revealed that Apple took more than 3 years to create a book, from finding suppliers to listing products. Among them, in the previous year and a half, Apple selected from a number of suppliers and determined suppliers. In the last year before mass production, engineers from different departments of Apple will be stationed at the factory to ensure the progress and quality of production.
Since the end of 2020, the industry has continuously revealed that Apple is looking for suppliers for automotive projects, and it has now been more than 1 year, and the preliminary selection work is likely to end after the middle of this year, which is basically the same as it is predicted by IT News. After that, Apple will conduct production verification based on the identified parts, and finally achieve mass production.
Obviously, Apple's car manufacturing is rapidly advancing, from the power battery, electronic components and other aspects of the simultaneous force. At the same time, how strong can Apple cars be intelligent? This has to mention Apple's self-developed chips.
Second, the chip: M1 Max can multi-chip integration in the future will be installed?
In recent years, Apple's self-developed S, A, M and other series of chips in the industry have relatively strong performance and performance performance, especially their own computer product line, after replacing the self-developed M1 series of chips, the actual experience is very good.
In fact, Apple's self-developed series of chips do not exist in isolation, but the close connection between several chips allows Apple to quickly develop chips and achieve close integration of multiple devices. Obviously, in Apple's first model, there is also a self-developed chip. And in order to achieve higher processing power, Apple is likely to use multi-chip integration.
In 2021, Apple's several major chip products are S7 (for Apple watch), A15 (for iPhone and iPad), M1 series (for Mac and iPad), of which S7 is based on the performance core development of A13 chips, M1 is to expand the size of the A14 CPU, GPU and other cores, and A15 is an iteration of A14.
The A15 chip in the iPhone
That is to say, although Apple has product updates every year and launches multiple chips, in fact, the A series of chips is the basis for all other chips.
When it comes to the integration of multiple chips, Apple is able to play with the entire chip industry.
In the M1 Max chip launched in the second half of last year, Apple did not disclose two information, one is that M1 Max also has a 16-core neural network acceleration unit that is blocked, and the other is that M1 Max has the ability to achieve multi-chip integration and achieve stronger computing power.
Apple M1 Max
Therefore, Apple's M1 Max neural network unit is theoretically capable of achieving 22TOPS hash rates.
Coupled with the excellent performance of the M1 Max, Apple can create a very good smart cockpit experience in the industry based on this chip.
As for autonomous driving, Apple can use multiple chips to integrate the way to achieve.
Prior to this, Twitter users @VadimYuryev showed the hidden parts of the M1 Max, which enables the M1 Max to implement multi-chip module integration (MCM) in this way to achieve greater computing performance.
Hidden part of the M1 Max
Some netizens even made 4 M1 Max integrated forms, which is also considered to be the chip form to be adopted by the high-end Mac product line in 2022.
The chip packaged in this form will be very suitable for automatic driving.
Let's take a look at what other players in the industry are doing. The WEILAI ET7 and Zhiji L7, which will be mass-produced this year, will be equipped with up to 4 NVIDIA Orin chips, and the theoretical computing power can reach 1016TOPS. According to the pictures of autonomous driving and controllers released by Weilai Automobile, it can be found that 4 Orin chips are integrated on 4 small boards and then connected to the motherboard.
The 4 NVIDIA Orin chips used by NIO ET7
Sensor-sensed data is fed into the master chip on the motherboard and then assigned to different chips for calculations. Two of the Orin chips are the main compute units, one orin for backup redundancy and one for learning.
Therefore, a large amount of data communication is required between the four chips and the motherboard. At the same time, autonomous driving is extremely sensitive to latency and requires higher bandwidth for faster communication.
At this stage, the latest mass-produced PCIe 5.0 has a bandwidth of 128GB/s, which can build a "bridge" between chips. However, the problem of insufficient PCIe bandwidth and long communication distance between chips has not been solved.
Apple's M1 Max chip is expected to solve the bottleneck of PCIe, which is closely related to its unified memory architecture. With an MCM integrated interface hidden at the edge of the chip, up to four M1 Max chips can be tightly integrated, significantly reducing the communication distance between the chips.
Under the existing connection method, the distance between the two chips is only a few centimeters or more than ten centimeters, which seems to be very short, but the 4 M1 chips are integrated, and the distance between the chips can be done at the millimeter level, which can be shortened by dozens of times.
In fact, there are players in the industry who have tried similar connections, and AMD has launched a graphics card with two chips integrated, which is installed in Apple's Mac Pro computer. The two cores are connected with Infinity Fabric Link, and the bandwidth can reach 84GB/s. In addition, AMD's Dragon series of server chips can also use similar technology.
Both graphics cores are connected using Infinity Fabric Link
In the first half of this year, we may be able to see computers that integrate multiple M1 Max chips, and Apple will also announce its communication bandwidth.
In addition, M1's unified memory architecture greatly reduces the latency of CPU and GPU access to memory. With dynamic memory allocation, the chip's calculations can be made more efficient. At the same time, M1 Max has 400GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a "horror" performance, and few players in the industry can achieve such a level.
Speaking of autonomous driving, Apple's unified memory architecture and the M1 Max chip's hidden MCM integrated interface make this chip more suitable for automatic driving. What Apple has to do may just expand the size of the neural network processor, reduce the size of the GPU, and achieve rapid development.
Third, Foxconn stuck in time The latest movie exposes a lot of details
As Apple's largest foundry, Foxconn is also optimistic about the prospects of Apple's car manufacturing, and has already begun to lay out car manufacturing platforms and car foundries. However, with Apple's existing car-making progress, Foxconn's layout speed has been somewhat slow.
In 2021, Foxconn announced its own car-making platform, and also developed three prototypes of Model C, Model E and Model T, positioning SUVs, sedans and commercial buses respectively.
Foxconn Model E prototype
At the same time, Foxconn has reached cooperation with nidec, Stellantis, Lordstown, Fisker and other parts companies and automakers to promote mass production of vehicles.
Obviously, Foxconn is not aiming at traditional car companies and unknown new power companies, because traditional car companies have their own factories, and the output of new power companies is very limited, and its target must be a big customer like Apple.
According to the mass production rhythm of Apple's car, partners will be determined within this year, and trial production should be started next year. According to the layout rhythm of Foxconn's electric vehicle factory, investing $10 billion to build a factory in the United States will also start operating in 2023, just stuck in Apple's car-making time node.
In fact, in addition to Foxconn, Magna is also well-known in the field of oem vehicles, Magna oem Mercedes-Benz G-Class, BMW 5 Series, Z4, Jaguar E-Pace, I-Pace and other luxury models for luxury brands.
Magna's complete vehicle plant
According to previous reports, Magna is also one of the foundries apple considers.
Perhaps, we will soon see the latest achievements in Apple's car manufacturing.
Before the real car debut, I don't know whether Apple is intentional or unintentional, and recently launched an original movie "Swan Elegy", which shows the future of autonomous driving travel scenarios, so that the outside world can see Apple's automatic driving future in advance.
Self-driving cars from Apple's original movies
The male protagonist in the film has a sci-fi electric car, the logo is an italic "S", with through-led headlights and taillights, the overall shape is very rounded, similar to bread.
The interior of the vehicle is very simple, the overall interior style is not luxurious, but very modern. There are four seats in the car and are seated face-to-face. There is not even a screen in the car, and the interaction required in the car is all done by the AR contact lenses worn by the occupants, which also coincides with the AR glasses that Apple is laying out.
In addition, the car has removed the steering wheel, the car no longer needs a driver, and the vehicle itself can achieve any point-to-point automatic driving.
The door to future travel that Apple is looking forward to is opening up to us little by little.