Geely self-developed the first domestic 7nm automotive-grade chip, Longying No. 1, which successfully broke the bottleneck problem

The good news is that the mainland officially released the world's first submarine computing platform, and the project plans to build a computing power cluster of more than 2000PFlops, which will effectively guarantee the demand for computing power from all walks of life in the mainland.

As we all know, the United States continues to increase restrictions on AI chips. Only allowed to sell the castrated Nvidia H20 and the Intel Gaudi 3 whose performance plummeted by more than 90% to us, and even a bit of a deception is too much, can we only be caught with our hands tied?

Of course not, in fact, domestic AI chips have reached the world's advanced level, but they are temporarily lagging behind in terms of process, and there is no problem in meeting daily applications in terms of performance. And, more crucially, we have great wisdom. For example, the performance of a single chip is not as good as theirs, but through the cluster effect and scale effect, it can also meet the demand for computing power.

In addition, various industries and enterprises do not need to build their own computing power centers, which is time-consuming and laborious, and has high costs.

Last year, the Kirin 9000S was born, and it was also announced in one fell swoop that we have made a substantial breakthrough in the field of chip manufacturing. Up to now, the cumulative number of activations of the Mate60 series has exceeded 17 million units. In addition, the Pura series has also been officially put on sale, and it is said that there have been upgrades and updates in chips, which shows that the chip production capacity has been greatly guaranteed.

It can be seen that domestic mobile phone chips and AI chips have been commercialized and have achieved good performance, so what about domestic chips in other fields?

We all know that China's new energy vehicles are developing rapidly and have established a great leading edge in the world, which is achieved by countless industrial chain enterprises.

At that time, Huawei's mobile phone sales had won the first place, but it was included in the entity list by the United States, and its world-leading Kirin 9000 chip could not obtain foundry channels, and then suffered multiple rounds of suppression, resulting in sales finally falling out of the top five. It can be seen that in the key parts link, once the neck is stuck, the consequences are unimaginable. Therefore, the same is true for automotive chips, if you want to continue to develop and continue to lead, you can't be controlled by others, and you must achieve localization.

So the good news is that the first domestic 7nm automotive-grade intelligent cockpit chip - Longying 1 has come out, and this chip is from Geely.

In fact, Geely in the early years had experienced the taste of being controlled by others, on the eve of a new model on the market, the advertising has been played, as a result of the supplier sitting on the ground to start the price, an engine rose from 17,000 yuan to 23,000 yuan, in the face of such no business ethics, Geely can only swallow its anger, helpless to accept. This also made Li Shufu, chairman of Geely, realize that without the core technology in his hands, there is no play at all, so he has strengthened his determination to take the road of independent research and development.

At present, Geely has independently developed a number of "China Heart" top ten engines, including 1.4T turbocharged engine, 1.8T turbocharged direct injection engine, 1.0T turbocharged direct injection engine, etc., as well as the 7DCT dual-clutch automatic transmission, which was rated as the world's top ten gearboxes, completely breaking the situation that key automotive parts are stuck.

In the field of automotive chips, Geely is also very far-sighted, Li Shufu once said that in order to meet the requirements of real intelligence, the car should be specially designed according to the characteristics of the vehicle and the intelligent needs, rather than buying a standard general chip.

Of course, it is not easy to engage in chip research and development, at the beginning of the year, OPPO announced that it would abandon the core project, a research and development team of thousands of people, tens of billions of capital investment, and finally came to naught, which is a pity. Therefore, it takes considerable courage and pattern to get out of the step of self-developed chips.

We all only know that the working environment of the car is changeable, for example, when the car is cold in winter, the outside temperature may be minus 20-30 degrees, and after working for a period of time, the temperature around the engine may reach more than 100 degrees, so the automotive chip must have the ability to work under such a span. In addition, it also needs to withstand long-term vibration, and it also needs to be durable, follow the car for a long time, and even the entire life cycle of the car will not be replaced.

Then, the above are only external objective conditions, and automotive chips also need to meet the needs of various calculations such as vehicle machine systems. In short, the development of automotive chips is not easy.

The good news is that through hard work, China's first 7nm automotive-grade SOC chip developed by Geely's SiEngine Technology, Longying No. 1, has been born. Longying No. 1 integrates 87 layers of circuits, 8.8 billion transistors, built-in 8 CPUs, plus 14 GPU chips, NPU computing power of 16TOPS, GPU computing power of 1800G, performance comparable to international first-line products.

For example, the Lynk & Co 08 vehicle machine system equipped with the Double Dragon Eagle No. 1 has twice the overall comprehensive computing power of the mainstream automotive chip Qualcomm 8155, but the cost is lower. In addition, in the 2023 new energy vehicle vehicle machine fluency list, Lynk & Co 08 EM-P successfully won the first place, which shows its strength.

Up to now, the Dragon Eagle No. 1 has successfully designated more than 20 main models in many mainstream car manufacturers. In addition, it is expected that in 2024, the shipment volume of Longying No. 1 may reach one million pieces. It should be noted that many technological breakthroughs in the past have only stayed in the laboratory stage, and the large-scale commercial application of Longying-1 is even more exciting.

So, is there a risk in the foundry of automotive chips? I dare not say that there is no at all, but the problem is not big.

On the one hand, automotive chips are not limited by space, so there is no need to use extreme processes, such as 5nm and 4nm, so it is unlikely that they will be limited in foundry.

On the other hand, the large-scale mass production of 9000S has shown that the domestic semiconductor industry chain has made substantial progress, and the next step is to stabilize production capacity, increase production capacity, and then replicate, and finally realize the full release of domestic high-end semiconductor industry chain. At that time, not to mention the domestic 7nm, even if it is the future Longying No. 2 and No. 3, even if it adopts 5nm and 4nm processes, it will be no problem to achieve large-scale mass production. In order to provide more powerful computing power support for the vehicle and give users a better car experience. I think this day must not be far away.

In the face of the current global semiconductor market environment, relying solely on foreign chips is obviously not 100% safe, and only independent and controllable automotive-grade chips can be realized. Fortunately, we have a big factory like Geely, which has made a layout in the field of automotive chips early, and has made a technological breakthrough in domestic automotive-grade chips. This move will strongly support the sustainable development and progress of China's new energy vehicle industry and better maintain its leading edge. So, I must give a thumbs up to Geely here.