In the field of autonomous driving in the mainland today, the autonomous driving chips provided by foreign suppliers have almost monopolized the entire market, and the new models released by the new domestic forces Wei Xiaoli have invariably used NVIDIA chips, and this year's domestic new energy brother BYD also announced cooperation with Nvidia in March this year, from the first half of 2023, BYD will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform on some of its new energy vehicles to achieve intelligent vehicle driving and intelligent parking. So since some models are equipped with NVIDIA chips, what about the remaining part?
Half NVIDIA, half Horizon?
Just a few days ago, BYD and Horizon officially announced a fixed-point cooperation, BYD will be equipped with Horizon autonomous driving chip journey 5 on some of its models. According to the plan, BYD models equipped with Horizon Journey 5 will be available as early as mid-2023, which gives us an idea of whose autopilot chip is equipped with another part of BYD's model.
This also means that next year, 2023, BYD's products will be equipped with at least two different autonomous driving solutions. Nvidia's previous article has been fully introduced, so where is this horizon sacred? What ability does it have to make itself favored by foreign brands such as NVIDIA and Mobileye?
Survive between Nvidia and Mobileye
Horizon is the first technology company in China to launch a vehicle-level AI chip, and can achieve rapid front-loading mass production on the car, in the current artificial intelligence, automatic driving and big data and other technologies in the automotive field applications, providing a lot of help, but also represents the first echelon level of domestic vehicle-grade chips. Horizon has a series of vehicle-grade AI chips in the industry that support L2 to L4 intelligent driving applications, and has experience in algorithm knowhow and mass production engineering for the intelligent landing of all-scenario vehicles. In terms of industrial cooperation, Horizon has always positioned Tier 2, providing a low-level computing platform with "chip + algorithm + tool chain" as the core, and open cooperation with industrial chain ecological partners to accelerate the mass production of intelligent driving.
The ideal ONE of the 2021 model is equipped with three Horizon chips, including two latest production autopilot chips, Journey 3, and one Journey 2 chip. The two Journey 3 provide efficient AI performance for the 2021 ideal ONE to achieve NOA navigation assisted driving functions, while the NPU computing platform of the Journey 2 can achieve full vehicle voice interaction. In fact, the chip equipped with horizon is not an important thing, but this makes the ideal the first automobile company to realize the full-stack self-development of assisted driving based on domestic AI chips. This is a cooperation between the new forces of car manufacturing and the new forces of creating "cores", which is also the first mass production of the Horizon Journey 3 chip, which really makes the horizon company enter our vision.
So what are the advantages that will make the ideal abandon Mobileye and instead let the 2021 ideal ONE throw itself into the arms of the horizon? In the increasingly competitive intelligent networked electric vehicle market, Tesla, Weilai, and Xiaopeng have all launched more feature-rich navigation assistance driving functions, and the research and development requirements of the new ideal ONE are more efficient than normal replacement models, and need to have the characteristics of sustainable iteration and optimization.
However, Mobileye adopts a black box solution, and the head car companies that pursue breakthroughs have no operating space at the software level, so that the ideal ONE cannot cope with the fierce market competition through the rapid upgrade function of OTA. At the same time, the head car companies hope to achieve automatic driving as soon as possible, will be equipped with as much as possible perception hardware, in the face of the huge data generated by these hardware, the demand for chip computing power is naturally intensifying, and Mobileye's latest EyeQ5H chip computing power is only 24TOPS, it is difficult to meet everyone's needs, and has to switch to other chips with large computing power.
At present, the vehicle specification-level chips required by intelligent networked electric vehicles in the industry are only verified by the market, such as Mobileye, Nvidia, Tesla FSD and Horizon. Mobileye has been ruled out, Tesla FSD well... Really for you, do you dare to use it? The remaining choices are NVIDIA and Horizon, NVIDIA's Orin chip is the highest in the current computing power industry, and can support the software full-stack self-development, but the use of NVIDIA chips will face the problem of a significant loss in computing efficiency in the calculation process, which requires high cost to overcome.
Car companies attach great importance to the stability and reliability of suppliers, and will not easily replace suppliers. However, as the ideal car of the head of the new force, for the 2021 ideal ONE will replace the previous chip supplier Mobileye with horizon, horizon efforts can be seen, horizon automatic driving chips can give car companies in their own automatic driving programs, full stack self-development, has a high degree of authority, in terms of computing power requirements, can meet the ideal ONE without lidar, so that the ideal ONE can achieve high-speed pilot assisted driving and other functions, as a domestic supplier, Its iteration speed and pursuit by capital can ensure its investment in cost, technical strength, and R&D funds.
If you have money, don't choose horizon?
To put it bluntly, because in the case of limited ideal car manufacturing costs and limited hardware in assisted driving, the balance of advantages and disadvantages has chosen horizon, as one of the few chip suppliers in China, the price is cheap and cannot always be its foundation. If the horizon can meet the conditions set by the ideal and make the ideal addictive, how can the ideal use NVIDIA's Orin chip on the new flagship L9?
This is also the current horizon to be broken through or is to re-find the problem of accurate positioning, they have technology, low cost, but when the car companies urgently need to turn to a higher level of automatic driving, its technical strength can not meet the needs of car companies, car companies will not hesitate to invest in the arms of NVIDIA and Mobileye again, the ideal new flagship L9 is expected to be priced to 500,000 yuan, which also makes it have more abundant car manufacturing costs to enrich its own automatic driving hardware, It needed NVIDIA Orin to meet its own autonomous driving needs, which made it abandon the horizon.
Horizon needs to find its own entry point here, and since higher-level models can't meet them at the moment, why not choose to develop assisted driving for low-level models?
Stand firm at the entry level and strive to "attack" upwards
BYD will have at least two autonomous driving solutions in 2023, one provided by Nvidia and one provided by Horizon. BYD Auto's NVIDIA DRIVE Orin is the world's highest-performing vehicle-grade chip today, computing 254 trillion times per second, with high-speed peripheral interfaces and high memory bandwidth (205GB/s) to seamlessly process data from multiple sensor configurations for safe and reliable intelligent driving. However, NVIDIA has achieved applications in many brands of products, but its high cost makes it difficult to explore to less than 250,000 yuan in models, which is obviously inconsistent with the system positioning of all BYD's current products.
Nvidia's Orin chip has 17 billion transistors, a single can provide 254 TOPS per second; and will be equipped with BYD's horizon of the latest product Journey 5 chip, it uses 16nm programming, can provide 128TOPS per second, the CPU uses 8 core ARM Cortex A55, in terms of power consumption, the power consumption of this generation of products is only 30W, the energy efficiency ratio can reach 4.3TOPS/W, although the computing power is not high, But it can be used as a chip for the vision-led automatic driving solution, which can be used in low-level models with less abundant automatic driving hardware, and these models are EXACTLY BYD's largest sales models, and since high-end cars are not reached, they can start from the auxiliary driving of entry-level models to cut into the market.
For the new forces, their pursuit of high-level automatic driving may be more radical, Horizon can not meet them now, but there are a large number of fuel models are also pursuing intelligent driving, they may not need L3, L4, only need a good L2+, at this time their advantages can be greatly reflected, this is also the focus of Horizon's current efforts, as of now, has been announced to carry the Horizon Journey chip has Changan UNI-T, Chery Ant, Zhiji Automobile, Changan UNI-K, GAC Aion AION Y, Lantu FREE, Sihao QX, GAC Trumpchi GS4 Plus, 2021 Ideal ONE, new Haval H9, Changan UNI-V and other models. In the future, with the large-scale mass production application of Journey 3 and the arrival of Journey 5, more models equipped with Horizon Journey series chips will also be released.
But horizon can not lie flat on these models, they have huge sales, can bring huge benefits to horizon, but also because of this, strong companies are also destined to top this piece of fat meat, high-end model sales are limited, this market is a blue ocean, if NVIDIA or Mobileye really launched a self-driving chip for these models, and strong performance, lower cost, then horizon now this bit of flame will also be snuffed out, so both to achieve mass production as soon as possible, but also to strive to "attack", If you don't abandon you like the ideal, it will still be staged.
If Chinese brands want to win the future of intelligent networked electric vehicles, they must cultivate China's own world-class intelligent networked electric vehicle suppliers, including the three-electric field of electric drive electronic control batteries, the field of automatic driving of chip operating system sensors, and the intelligent cockpit and service are equally important. CATL has become a world-class supplier in the field of batteries and has a considerable right to speak. But in the chip field, horizon has just taken the first step, and the opponent to be faced is much stronger, how to find the correct positioning, breakthrough, it is particularly important.