Under the general trend of intelligence in the automotive industry, more and more car companies began to "exert force" in the intelligent cockpit, as a part directly related to the user experience, optimizing the interaction system inside the intelligent cockpit has become more and more urgent, which also makes the system's "nerve center" SOC chip gradually "rolled in", more powerful chips can maintain the stability and continuous evolution of the intelligent cockpit system, in the field of intelligent cars, chip computing power can already be in a position such as vehicle zero hundred achievements, power torque, length and width high parameters. The number of 8155 appears more and more at the new car conference, and continues to become the highlight of the major car companies to promote new cars, so today I will talk to you about this new intelligent car hardware "net red" - Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip.
The price difference of the car is huge, why should it be sought after?
Mention the numbers 8155, you may feel very familiar, because more and more models are currently carrying this chip, from the 100,000-level MG5 Scorpio, to the 300,000-level Lynk & Co 09, and then to more than half a million Weilai flagship sedan ET7, all of which have its presence.
Compared with another mainstream car chip today - Qualcomm Snapdragon 820A, the cost of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip is much higher, the 820A chip is priced at about 40 US dollars, about 250 yuan; while the 8155 chip is priced at about 250 US dollars, about 1600 yuan, which is more than 6 times that of the 820A chip. For models priced at more than 200,000, the cost pressure of using this chip may be relatively small, but for the 100,000-level model that is particularly sensitive to cost factors, the Snapdragon 8155 is a bit of a "pressure mountain".
So what are the advantages of this chip? What role can it do for the smart cockpit? So that the car companies at any cost to "please" it "get on the car".
The new "darling" of the smart cockpit, how functional is it?
Qualcomm's 8155 chip is a currently quite powerful smart cockpit SOC chip, the full name is SA8155P, it is manufactured using a 7-nanometer process, with eight cores, computing power of 8TOPS, that is, 8 trillion operations per second, it can support up to 6 cameras, connect 4 2K screens or 3 4K screens, support WiFi6, support 5G, support Bluetooth 5.0.
See here, you should be able to understand why the current car large screen can be more and more, more and more bigger, three screens, four screens, and even five screens can achieve linkage, while countless cameras inside and outside the car, as well as support for 5G, real-time data transmission, are because soC chips have strong performance, in order to make these screens, cameras, sensors can be organically combined, forming today's highly interactive car machine system.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip, which is the mainstream Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip on the market today, is the third generation of smart cockpit chips released by Qualcomm in 2019, and it is from this generation that Qualcomm will no longer call it a car processor, but name it an automotive digital cockpit platform. After the release of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip, 20 automakers have cooperated with Qualcomm to launch the Snapdragon 3rd Generation Snapdragon Auto Digital Cockpit Platform Products equipped with the 8155 chip, which have been mass-produced and commercially used since last year, and the 2nd generation Snapdragon Auto digital cockpit platform products equipped with the previous generation of "Core Emperor" 820A chips have opened up a gap.
Just because of Caton, you have to abandon the 820A?
For example, the Extreme Kr 001 currently uses an 820A chip, using 8G storage, Xiaopeng P7, Ideal ONE, and mid-term modification of Audi A4L have also adopted it. From the user's actual car feedback, the extreme Kr 001 equipped with 820A chip car machine system often appears in the situation of Caton, as a 2016 release of the vehicle standard grade high-performance chip, mounted on a 2021 listed 300,000-level brand flagship pure electric coupe, quite live up to the expectations of the outside world, although its own computing power has reached more than twice the basic version of 820A, but for an intelligent flagship car, it is still impossible to make more system redundancy.
From the perspective of market cases, the dual-system, dual-chip logic used by the ideal ONE can effectively eliminate the occurrence of the phenomenon of car and machine caton. On the ideal ONE, the Linux system coexists with the Android system, the former as the vehicle's real-time operating system to ensure reliable vehicle control and driving safety corresponding to the 12.3-inch instrument screen and 10.1-inch central control screen, the latter is responsible for intelligent experience and infotainment, corresponding to the 16.2-inch central large screen and 12.3-inch co-pilot entertainment screen. At the same time, in order to ensure the smooth experience of the car machine, the ideal ONE uses Qualcomm 820A chip and Texas Instruments J6 chip to support android systems and Linux systems respectively, without having to let the instrument screen and control screen "eat" the chip performance of the 820A used in the car machine system, leaving enough performance redundancy for the car machine system, which in turn brings rapid car and machine response. This approach is also a last resort, and the latest ideal flagship L9 model is about to use a double 8155 chip, where a double 8155 pit will be cut, and then it will be filled.
For Extreme Kr 001, in the face of complex task processing, it is an indisputable fact that the Qualcomm 820A car processing chip with a sense of "age" is tight in performance, and it is the key to promote chip hardware upgrades as soon as possible, and it is also the core of the swing mentality of potential consumers. Extreme Kr was also officially announced a few days ago, equipped with 8155 chip of Extreme Kr 001 is about to meet with us, it seems that the overall chip is just a chip, the chip computing power has increased by 3 or 4 times, but it is actually an iteration of the cockpit platform, laying the foundation for the continuous iteration of the intelligent cockpit in the future.
What exactly is it for intelligent interaction?
One-core multi-screen" intelligent cockpit solution will become the mainstream trend. At the cost control level, compared with the "multi-core multi-screen" scheme, the total cost of the "one-core multi-screen" scheme is reduced; at the communication level, the multi-screen interactive information in the "multi-screen" scheme is transmitted inside the chip, which changes the way in which information is transmitted through CAN/LIN bus and other communications between multiple operating systems, and the communication time is greatly reduced; at the security level, the "one-core multi-screen" scheme is adopted, the system complexity is reduced, the number of chips and other devices is reduced, and the overall reliability is increased. Therefore, the 8155 chip with greater computing power will be so sought after by major car companies.
Under the trend of "one core and multiple screens", the on-board operating system will be the software core of the intelligent cockpit. Through the vehicle operating system to manage the hardware resources in the intelligent cockpit, the software operation is allocated, and the operating environment is provided for the in-vehicle application APP, so that the audio and video signals of the intelligent cockpit can play the greatest role, create a comfortable driving environment for the driver, and provide vehicle driving information, navigation information, audio entertainment and other information.
Use it whenever you want? Want to pretend?
From the perspective of automotive chip manufacturers, to achieve the "one-core multi-screen" solution represented by the 8155 chip, it is necessary to develop system-level chips, and the technical threshold will be raised. In the early process of chip design, testing and verification, chip manufacturers need to invest a lot of R&D funds and time to meet the many requirements of the automaker's vehicle specification level and various functional safety certifications.
As a vehicle-grade chip, Qualcomm's SA8155P is actually both related and different from the often said mobile phone chip. Many of the car-grade chips are transplanted from mobile phone chips, and the prototype of the SA8155P vehicle-grade chip is qualcomm Snapdragon 8155. On this basis, it has been optimized, and its computing power and performance are slightly worse, mainly because the car-grade chip needs to face a more harsh environment, such as the temperature range of the chip working is much larger than that of the mobile phone, and the design service life is longer than that of the mobile phone, and the security requirements are also relatively high, and there is an independent security design, which requires more complex data verification and ensures higher security.
Overall, the technical difficulty of the car-level chip is higher than that of the mobile phone chip, so when the same chip is made into a car-level chip, its performance relative to the mobile phone chip has decreased to varying degrees, but it is not completely so, the 8155 family actually has a performance-level SA6155P and a supreme-level SA8195P chip, why is it divided into three different performance chips in a generation of products? In fact, the three levels have their own corresponding hardware platforms, but Qualcomm provides a unified software framework, what are the benefits of a unified software framework? The customer can use the unified framework to develop his software and hardware, which can be configured according to the needs of the end customer and the car manufacturer for different grades of models and adapt to different user experiences.
Pay more cost and time just to adapt to it
From the perspective of auto parts manufacturers, in order to adapt to more advanced chips such as 8155 chips to achieve "one core multi-screen" solution, so that the development cycle becomes longer, it takes an average of 12 to 18 months or even longer, and the development difficulty lies in the multi-system operation test verification in the virtualized environment, so that it can ensure the smooth and reliable of the intelligent cockpit platform. From the perspective of automakers, in the face of fierce market competition, if you want to attract consumers through personalized smart cockpits, you must invest enough in capital and technology research and development. At present, in the context of cost reduction, how to balance the relationship between cost and maintain product hardware quality control and software stability and reliability is a huge challenge. Especially for models with low prices and relatively thin profits, whether to "nudge" the 8155 needs to be carefully weighed whether the cost performance and so on have reached a certain balance.
If you can not effectively balance the cost of using the 8155 chip, then it is possible to directly express this part in the price, although consumers know that this thing is very cattle, but if the smart cockpit can not reflect the effect of 8155, then consumers will still "retreat", I have doubts about what upgrades the smart cockpit after the MG5 Scorpio uses 8155, the basic version of this model MG5, obviously in the smart cockpit has not made too much achievements, and the expansion space is insufficient. How to play 8155?
Of course, there are also car companies that advertise the use of 8155 for their own products, and hang up sheep's heads to sell dog meat, quietly change the "core", and fool consumers.
summary:
When it comes to smart cockpits, the needs of each of them may be different, some people may pursue high-resolution multi-screen display, so that the entire car is full of technology, like a private theater in the car; some people may pay attention to human-computer interaction, hoping to reduce the proportion of physical buttons and touch screen control, improve effective communication with the car, so that the car understands my mind more; some people hope to have a sufficiently safe in-car prompt function. For example, the monitoring system can promptly remind or alarm the driver in case of distraction and fatigue to ensure the safety of the people in the car. In short, no matter what kind of efficient, cool, safe functions are inseparable from the blessing of powerful performance chips, a single 8155 can meet the current mainstream new forces for the functional needs of intelligent cockpit systems, so what kind of exciting experience will the double 8155 have?