Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Machine Heart Editorial Department
On March 23, the Chief Chi Hang Executive Conference, one of the parallel forums of the "AI Technology Annual Conference" of Machine Heart, received widespread attention from the industry. Focusing on the fields of automotive robots, chips and autonomous driving, the conference invited 11 representative corporate executives and experts in the industry to speak for the era of intelligent travel.
Among them, the first roundtable session of the conference, with the theme of "Chip Challenge in the Era of Large Computing Power", invited Yang Yuxin, Chief Marketing Officer of Black Sesame Intelligence, Wang Ping, Executive President of Cambrian Xingge, Wang Kai, Director and CEO of Core Qing Technology, and Li Bo, Vice President of Lotus Technology and Head of Intelligent Driving Business Line. Four industry leaders participated in the discussion on the current topic of automotive chips, and expressed a very heavy and representative view.
Is hash rate the primary reference indicator?
From the outside world, high-computing chips are generally regarded as the most critical point of competition, and this competition is usually focused on high-end autonomous driving chips. When discussing the autonomous driving chip, the guests also expressed their views on the current situation of "computing power as the only communication indicator".
In the view of Yang Yuxin, chief marketing officer of Black Sesame Intelligence, the consideration of chips is multifaceted. Whether from the perspective of business logic or technology evolution, chip companies need to help customers achieve the same functions and computing power at a smaller cost, higher system concentration and lower power consumption. That is to say, while continuously improving performance, the overall design of the chip must also be more reasonable.
This view has also been endorsed by Wang Ping, CEO of Cambrian Xingge, and Wang Kai, director and CEO of Core Qing Technology.
Wang Ping believes that in addition to the AI computing power value, the automatic driving chip also needs to pay attention to its comprehensive performance. "For example, CPU power, memory access bandwidth, system latency, power consumption, economy, and other indicators are very important."
Wang Kai said that computing power must be very important because it determines the degree of freedom of software. But the problem is that there are cost barriers to hardware, not how big you want to be. "The most important indicator of chip design is to look at the PPA (Performance, Power, Area), that is, to combine its performance, power consumption and area to evaluate whether the product can be commercialized."
Li Bo, vice president of Lotus Technology and head of the intelligent driving business line, interpreted from the perspective of intelligent driving system requirements: "At present, we are entering the 'computing power era' from the 'horsepower era'." He said that in the past 100 years, horsepower has been one of the important indicators of the performance of cars. "But in the moment, we can turn computing power into horsepower."
Li Bo said that the first product to truly achieve a high-level intelligent driving experience requires a higher-level perception system, faster response speed, a stronger large computing power platform, and a highly redundant electronic and electrical architecture. However, he also said that in the process of the evolution of cars to intelligence, computing power is only one part of it.
Is "heap computing power" necessary?
"Software-defined cars, hardware-defined software ceilings." When talking about the demand for computing power, Li Bo pointed out another meaning of the current "stack computing power" of car companies. In Li Bo's view, higher computing power and stronger sensors, reserved enough computing power, reserved enough sensors, is to leave redundancy for the performance requirements of future intelligent driving systems. Otherwise, it's like the current application logic can run through the old phone, but it can't really run effectively.
Wang Ping also believes that software is easier to upgrade than hardware, and computing power is fundamental to determining the degree of upgrading: "At present, from the perspective of OTA trends, the hardware and software parts are gradually decoupling." He said that once the car is sold, it is not easy to recall the hardware upgrade, but the software can be quickly upgraded through the OTA algorithm, which also leads to car companies began to "plan ahead" on the hardware.
"Although the current computing power is somewhat redundant, many car companies will make selective pre-embedding. Including products such as ET7, it has reached 1000 TOPS. Therefore, smart cars have tended to plan the reservation of computing power in advance when developing products."
Yang Yuxin also said that the current process of automatic driving technology is still in the second half of the first half. The general computing power of current automotive products is theoretically sufficient. However, from another point of view, now automatic driving also needs to educate users and educate the market, so that everyone has a more intuitive impression of automatic driving, computing power and scenes. At the same time, it is also necessary to consider the upgrade iteration requirements under the technical architecture of future software-defined vehicles, and large computing power is essential.
"Computing power itself is a selling point to support autonomous driving, and it is also what all car manufacturers want to emphasize now. This is also why many car manufacturers are increasing the demand for chip computing power." Yang Yuxin said.
When will the missing core problem be solved?
"There is now a consensus in the industry that this year may still remain in a state of lack of cores, and there will be some changes at the earliest until the beginning of next year." When talking about the current hot topic of missing cores, Yang Yuxin, chief marketing officer of Black Sesame Intelligence, said.
He believes that the long-term continuous lack of cores is ultimately caused by two reasons, on the one hand, production capacity is limited, on the other hand, there are more and more chips required for bicycles. In his view, whether domestic chips can top and whether the expansion plan of global production capacity can meet the demand are the two key points to change this situation.
This view was also shared by the rest of the guests, and Wang Kai, director and CEO of CoreTek, said: "The ultimate problem of chips to be solved is supply localization." Wang Kai also used the 2021 results of some U.S. car companies with localized supply chains as an example: "In addition to Tesla's revenue increase, GM and Ford also created the best profit year ever, because they can fully guarantee the supply of components." 」
At the level of expanding production capacity, Yang Yuxin also pointed out some of these problems: "The most serious product with missing cores is mature process chips, which is usually the place where chip manufacturers are most reluctant to expand production capacity, because not only the production line is expensive, but the profit margin after the expansion may not be high enough."
In addition, Wang Kai also pointed out that the current lack of core is also partly due to the concentrated release of demand previously suppressed by the epidemic, because the market has to meet both suppressed demand and new demand, resulting in a continuous shortage of industry production capacity. In the face of this situation, chip companies do not dare to expand production capacity, otherwise they are likely to face overcapacity in the future.
Although the lack of cores is highly related to the epidemic and has attracted widespread attention from inside and outside the industry because of its long-term and sustained impact, Wang Kai said that the lack of cores is actually a relatively common situation: "The shortage of chips is not only today, but has always existed. Just like the Memory that can be seen has high and low, cheap is more, on the contrary, it is scarce. At that time, we also encountered LDMOS base stations, and the whole of China had to go to 3G and 4G, which was basically a complete shortage, and no chip could be supplied."
The opportunity created by the "lack of core"
While foreign chip companies give priority to supporting local car manufacturers, they actually bring growth and development opportunities to domestic chip companies. Yang Yuxin said: "In the case of a shortage of chip production capacity, foreign chip companies may give priority to supporting local car manufacturers, and it is difficult for Chinese car manufacturers to get first-hand sources, which is also an appeal for the rise of China's car regulation chip manufacturers." We're probably in the best of opportunity when we're doing it. We want to seize this opportunity to grow with Chinese car companies and avoid similar situations in the future."
He also said that the development of the entire Chinese autonomous driving industry is now faster than the world, which requires the joint support of the entire upstream industry chain, which is a challenge and an opportunity for local chip companies.
Wang Kai also expressed a similar view: "What we do is not just to follow the big factories to make products, but to really make advanced products together." For example, the 7nm vehicle specification process should be the most advanced in China. And in the whole process of cooperation, we feel that this year and next year, there will be no problems in terms of production capacity and other aspects."
The continuous lack of core crisis will not only change the pattern of the chip industry, but also affect the car companies as the downstream of the chain. In addition to Tesla, which has long been laid out, car companies such as Xiaopeng and Weilai have also reported plans for self-developed chips. In this regard, Wang Kai explained: "In the past two years, the continuous chip shortage has broken the balance of the global semiconductor industry, and the main engine factory is more and more aware of the importance of mastering the core technology, so it is also very concerned about the diversity of the supply chain and ensuring the security of supply."
But Wang Kai also mentioned that there will be many problems in the self-development of chips, the threshold of automatic driving chips is high, and once it takes a detour, it will face huge financial losses, which will also cause uncoordinated planning. At the same time, the vehicle-grade chip is different from the consumer-grade chip, the performance, power consumption and reliability requirements are higher, but also to complete the vehicle-level certification, the cycle is longer, the investment is larger, and it is necessary to recover the upfront cost through the application of a variety of cars.
Wang Ping, CEO of Cambrian Xingge, also introduced that in the growth stage of Xingge Technology, Cambrian will carry out joint research and development with Xingge Technology. In terms of supply chain, Xingge Technology also has a lot of synergy with Cambrian.
In the roundtable discussion session of the "Chief Intellectual Officer Conference", three guests from domestic chip companies and a guest representing a new generation of intelligent car companies expressed their views and had a heated discussion, showing the current development trend of automotive chips for everyone and outlining the prospects of related industries. In Auto Byte's future reports, we will continue to pay attention to the relevant developments of automotive chips and bring you more insights from the "Chief Chi Heng Officer", so stay tuned.