Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
In recent years, the smart car and autonomous driving car industries have been in hot spotlight. The software and hardware technology related to it has also become an important application in this field. Therefore, enterprises that start up around AI and chip technology have also mushroomed. Moreover, a small number of enterprises have stood firm in the market game for several years and even stood out.
As the first artificial intelligence chip company in China to realize the mass production of vehicle-grade AI chips on the car, Horizon is one of them. At present, in addition to Horizon, in addition to Horizon, intelmobile and NVIDIA in the United States, and Xilinx, which has been acquired by AMD, can be mass-produced and supplied worldwide. This also means that in the smart car track, people are also expected to see the rise of the "Chinese core".
However, in this technology-intensive track, compared with Intel and Nvidia, AMD and other industry veterans, Horizon is slightly immature, and as a new force in automotive chips, the challenges that need to be faced in the future are self-evident.
Automotive chips staged a "divided" situation
The importance of automotive chips to automotive functions is also beyond doubt. For example, in early December last year, the Great Wall Euler Automobile stole the "chip incident" and caused an uproar. The reason is that when the owner of the previous apple mobile phone used the interconnection function of the good cat car machine, he found that Euler car did not have a CarPlay function, and then the owner found that the car was equipped with an Intel main chip.
However, in Euler's official publicity, the chip parameters only marked the use of Qualcomm chips. In fact, the suppliers of chips used in Euler Good Cat's vehicles also include Intel, Renesas and other manufacturers.
Since then, hundreds of consumers have also complained through various platforms that the Great Wall Euler Good Cat electric vehicle has serious inconsistencies between the manufacturer's publicity configuration and the actual configuration of the vehicle, shoddy charging, suspected false publicity and fraudulent sales. The incident was even exposed by CCTV, which also forced Euler to apologize publicly under the pressure of public opinion and actively deal with related after-sales problems.
Through the sensitivity of consumers to chip brands, it is enough to see that chips are the core components of automobiles, and the competition around the core technology of automobile chips is also visible to the naked eye. At the same time, domestic auto manufacturers have to be subject to people due to lack of technology.
Therefore, in order to enhance the brand influence and product quality of the car, domestic auto manufacturers choose a better car chip solution, which has also become a last resort. Under such a market situation, the development of independent chips has also become a potential demand for many enterprises.
However, it should be known that the threshold for research and development of chip technology is very high, and generally traditional car companies do not have such technical strength. To this end, Horizon has developed automotive chips with open source attributes through the basic technology platform of "algorithm + chip + tool chain", trying to solve the pain points of lack of core for these automotive companies that are "waiting to be fed" in chip demand.
It is understood that as early as September 2020, during the Beijing International Automobile Exhibition, Horizon released a new generation of in-vehicle AI chip Journey 3. According to reports, The Journey 3 adopts a 16-nanometer process, based on the BPU2.0 architecture independently developed by Horizon, which can support a variety of application scenarios such as high-level assisted driving, intelligent cockpit, automatic parking assistance, high-level automatic driving and crowdsourced high-precision maps.
A year later, Horizon officially released the industry's first all-scenario vehicle intelligent central computing chip Journey 5, as well as the all-scenario vehicle intelligent solution and all-scenario vehicle intelligent computing platform based on Journey 5, as well as the vehicle computing platform based on Journey 5, the vehicle intelligent solution and the real-time vehicle operating system TogetherOS.
Horizon's core competencies can be put in short. Once the car company cooperates with Horizon, application journey 5 will also be able to use its in-vehicle operating system TogetherOS to achieve more software and hardware applications to make the car more intelligent.
It is worth mentioning that at the chip conference of Horizon, SAIC, Great Wall, Jiangqi, Changan, BYD, Nezha, Lantu, etc. established the intention of the first mass production of Journey 5, while Ideal reached a pre-research cooperation based on Journey 5 with Horizon.
However, "Yu see column" noted that from the perspective of the computing power of a single chip, there is still a certain gap between the Journey 5 and NVIDIA's Orin, and the single-chip hashrate of the Journey 5 is 128TOPS, while orin is 254TOPS.
It is understood that both are planned to be launched in 2022, when the two will carry out a new round of competition. Moreover, at present, domestic autonomous driving companies are mainly based on NVIDIA's hardware platform GPU to do system development, because NVIDIA's hardware platform has a more mature and complete software and hardware ecology, in this regard, horizon is obviously difficult to compete with NVIDIA.
Putting aside the technical gap, horizon as a start-up enterprise, as a new force in the automotive chip industry, how to get more trust from automakers and suppliers in technology and products is also a real problem, even if it can be done, I am afraid it will take time.
Compared with the smartphone market, you can glimpse the difficulty of large-scale promotion and application of automotive chips. For example, although there are also some domestic mobile phone brands that have independently developed chips with specific functions, they have not become mainstream in the end, which is attributed to this.
It can be seen that under the pattern of competing for deer and multi-party division, Horizon has fewer advantages as a latecomer, and it is bound to face greater pressure in the future with the increase of players entering the game.
Advocate openness or get in the way
Zhang Yufeng, vice president of Horizon, once declared that Horizon is the chip company that understands algorithms the most and the algorithm companies that understand chips the most. Its founder has also mentioned many times that the core concept of its entrepreneurship is openness and inclusiveness, integrating more automotive industry resources. For example, Horizon founder and CEO Yu Kai once said: "Horizon does not do mass production hardware, does not do software bundling, does not do closed solutions." ”
It is understood that horizon plans to open the underlying technology platform multi-dimensional open source to different ecological partners to accelerate the development of intelligent applications in automobiles and the mass production process of intelligent vehicles. This also means that Horizon is taking the route of the Opener Platform, although the pattern is very large, but the challenges that Horizon will face if it wants to open up are also obvious.
First, while Horizon has some confidence in its technology, it needs to go through a process of trial and error in the new field of autonomous driving. As we all know, the automatic driving industry is still a relatively new industry, and related solutions also need corresponding functional chips and AI algorithms for their special application scenarios in order to truly empower car companies.
For example, the most concerned safety issues for autonomous vehicles have put forward higher requirements for the chip level of autonomous vehicles. Previously, the safety accident of Tesla's self-driving car has aroused great concern in society.
Especially with the gradual upgrading of the level of automatic driving, from the L3 level that the driver can completely abandon the control in many scenarios to the L4 level full automatic driving that is about to usher in, the consistency of the technical reliability and chip performance of the autonomous vehicle has put forward higher requirements.
At the same time, aside from some personalized chip research and development needs, basic functional safety and expected functional safety are also frequently mentioned in the field of autonomous vehicles, and network security is also increasingly valued, which will be the test that Horizon must face.
Secondly, openness is not just a slogan, and the hardware equipment and software products that need to connect the entire industry chain are not overnight. Taking Xiaomi, a smartphone manufacturer, and Baidu, the number one company with AI layout, as an example, the formation of their ecological chain is the cumulative effect of several years of precipitation.
However, the autonomous driving automotive industry, whether it is upstream suppliers or midstream automakers, is still in the stage of updating and iteration, and it will take time to mature. Therefore, even if they can integrate the resources of the upper and middle reaches, they also need to run into each other and jointly find technologies and solutions that are more suitable for long-tail scene applications. Obviously, it will also face uncertain risks such as long cycles and large investments.
Third, under the influence of the epidemic, the lack of core in the world has become the norm. The reason is that chip technology not only needs to be developed, but also manufactured. However, in our chip manufacturing industry, there are very few companies that can undertake close chip processing.
Moreover, through the latest development signals released by NVIDIA, Intel and so on, they are basically R&D and manufacturing routes to alleviate the pressure of insufficient chip production capacity, and Horizon wants to replicate such a model in the short term, which is not easy.
Therefore, in the long run, the chip industry will still have many key links and players, including EDA design tools, including fabs and packaging plants. This also means that in addition to research and development, Horizon's chip process capabilities will also be tested, and perhaps even one day in the future, it will be like mobile phone chips, subject to people in the supply chain and manufacturing capabilities.
At the same time, whether it is the demand of the autonomous driving industry or the immaturity of related process technology, horizon chip production capacity lacks imagination space. This can be seen by comparing the gap between horizon and industry giants.
It has been observed that for a long time, the autopilot chip market has been controlled by Mobileye and Xilinx, and Mobileye's market share is as high as 70%. In this context, traditional chip giants such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Intel (which acquired Mobileye) have also entered the game, successively launching large-scale autonomous driving chips to participate in seizing market opportunities under the great transformation of smart cars.
On the other hand, horizons, although several generations of products have been released in succession, but the sales volume is not optimistic. According to public data, the sales of horizon chips in 2020 are only 160,000 pieces. Therefore, it has also created a cruel reality: more than 90% of China's automotive chips rely on imports, which is a huge gap between the proportion of China's automobile industry in more than one-third of the world.
And the sales gap between Horizon and other giants is also like a graben. Under the objective conditions of vast disparities in technology, brand and other strengths, it is almost impossible for Horizon to catch up with other head enterprises in the short term.
epilogue
The competition around core technologies such as chips and AI algorithms has never stopped. The same is true on vertical tracks such as smartphones, smart homes, and smart cars.
In the historical context of the consumer electronics industry chips in the United States such as Nvidia and Qualcomm occupying the industry's first opportunity, it is not ruled out that the new power of chips players may have the possibility of overtaking in curves. However, the "monopoly" pattern they have formed for a long time is probably not just a survivor bias, but because of the industry barriers they have built, they have been able to stand firm.
The emergence of the horizon and the entry into the head camp also made people see a possibility. Perhaps in the past, the tragedy of the lack of core in the Chinese smartphone market and the embarrassment of being stuck in the neck of the technology card will not be staged in the automotive industry.
However, whether the ground platform is the "White Horse Knight" who can turn the tide is not yet known.