Yang Yuxin, Chief Marketing Officer of Black Sesame Intelligence
"Before 2025, if you haven't been on the table, if the customer hasn't given you a mass-produced project, and you don't have a fixed point, it's going to be very difficult. Recently, Titanium Media App had an exclusive conversation with Yang Yuxin, chief marketing officer of Black Sesame Intelligence, and when talking about market competition in the process of communicating with him, he once again mentioned his point of view a few years ago: 2025 will be a critical moment for intelligent driving chips.
The 2024 Beijing Auto Show is underway, and it is not difficult to see from the scene that the industry is entering a watershed: the leading car companies are building a wider intelligent moat with intelligence, so as to open up their advantages, while the middle and tail companies may fall behind because they can't keep up.
As a key link in intelligent driving, automotive chips face the same challenges. It is necessary not only to ensure that the price can be out of the circle in the red ocean, but also to ensure hardware redundancy, intelligent driving, and prepare for a central integrated computing platform.
From volume computing power to cost-effective
Automotive chips are in the upstream of the industrial chain and are Party B, so most of its competition for the highland changes with the changes in the automotive industry. In the past period, with the speed and demand of the intelligent transformation of the automotive industry, the automotive chip industry has been increasing its computing power.
The reason for this is that with the improvement of the level of intelligent driving, the demand for computing power is greater, especially L3 and above. According to the analysis of Yiou think tank, every time the level of assisted driving increases, the computing power chip required will increase by more than ten times, and the computing power required by L4 and L5 may be close to 400TOPS and 4000+ TOPS.
Image source: Black Sesame Smart
However, statistics show that in November 2023, the urban NOA penetration rate of the domestic passenger car market is about 1%, which is still in the early stage of introduction. In Yang Yuxin's view, "the more popular thing now is high-speed NOA, and urban NOA will land this year." The popularity and maturity of urban NOA is the same as that of high-speed NOA two years ago. NOA technology will be lowered to the 100,000 price range, and models can be equipped as standard. ”
The wind direction began to change, and the blind volume computing power began to be questioned by some.
Under the influence of the "cost reduction war", car companies are more pragmatic, and consumers' demand for intelligent driving is more common. In terms of the price trend of equipped models, the models equipped with the 200+ computing power platform began to drop from more than 350,000 to 20-250,000 yuan, and the typical representatives are Zhiji LS6 and Xiaopeng G6, which undoubtedly puts forward great requirements for cost reduction.
"The pressure on car companies to reduce costs can go upstream, and they must go upstream, which is business. Naturally, we are shouldering the key mission of helping car companies reduce costs. Yang Yuxin talked about the pressure of cost reduction and said to Titanium Media App.
On the other hand, the pursuit of more cost-effective intelligent driving solutions for low-end models will also be conducive to the development of algorithm players with strong cost control capabilities and chip suppliers with mass production experience.
"The traditional way to reduce costs is to press the upstream supply chain, but when the traditional way fails to achieve the goal of cost reduction, it has to reduce costs structurally, and use innovative technologies to reduce costs structurally, which is also the main purpose of the Wudang series of chips. He went on to explain that integrating the four intelligences in the car into one chip, to put it bluntly, is to use one chip to find a way to replace four chips, and replace four systems with one system, "which can help customers better reduce costs." ”
The challenge and implementation of "cross-domain".
The Wudang series of chips is a product launched by Black Sesame Intelligence in April 2023, which is a chip platform that integrates the four domains of cockpit, intelligent driving, body control and gateway.
At the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, Black Sesame Intelligent exhibited the mass-produced model chips C1236 and C1296 in the Wudang series for the first time.
Image source: Black Sesame Smart
According to Black Sesame Intelligence, from chip IP selection, architecture design to production process and packaging, the whole process adopts automotive standards, and has built-in self-developed core IPs: high-performance ISP and high-performance NPU, supporting a technical framework with camera sensing and AI computing as the core.
Among them, the C1236 single-chip integrates sensor access, algorithm acceleration, wire-speed data forwarding, 4K display, etc. At the auto show, Black Sesame Intelligence and FAW Hongqi also jointly released a single-chip intelligent vehicle control project based on the C1200 family. It is reported that the new cooperation plan is based on the C1200 family, which will cover intelligent driving, vehicle data exchange and control functions.
In addition, Black Sesame Intelligence also officially announced the CoreFusion cockpit and driving integrated software open platform built in cooperation with JOYNEXT (NESINEXT) based on the C1296 chip. The solution supports the multi-screen human-computer interaction function of the latest Android and powerful 3D engine tools, and also supports the 7V BEV autonomous driving perception algorithm based on the black sesame intelligent neural network to accelerate DynamAI NN.
The Wudang C1200 family is a cross-domain computing chip platform, but there is also a saying that the cockpit chip should be varied, vivid, and lively, and the intelligent driving chip should be redundant and safe for vehicle specifications. Putting these two together, OEMs have less flexibility to define their product portfolios.
In this regard, Yang Yuxin analyzed the Titanium Media App from the aspects of trends, car company needs and technology.
He believes that the trend of the future vehicle architecture to move towards central computing is the industry consensus. "Central computing actually means that a large number of intelligent domains will gradually merge into one large central computing domain. In this process, we believe that the same as other industry development laws, chip companies must first take out products before they can be marketized. ”
Although car companies have intelligent driving R&D departments and cockpit R&D departments, all departments should be set up to serve the business - through the integration between domains to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
And from a technical point of view, "flexibility is precisely the problem that our chips want to solve. According to Yang Yuxin's introduction to Titanium Media App, on the one hand, Black Sesame Intelligence uses hard isolation technology on the chip. On the other hand, the software system can support different operating systems and applications with different experiences.
2025 is a critical period for the development of the industry
Before and after the Beijing Auto Show, we can see that not only car companies compete with each other, but also intelligent driving chip companies continue to demonstrate their competitiveness through new products, technologies, and car company customers. But no matter which way it is, in the end, it depends on the sales volume to speak, whether the car company customers buy or not, and whether the strategic goal is achieved, is the most weighty and fair competition.
In the face of fierce competition, Black Sesame Intelligence has also formulated a detailed strategy. Yang Yuxin said that the first step of the strategy is to revolve around China, that is, to support Chinese car companies to do the Chinese market.
The second step is to do the Chinese market with global automotive customers and partners. "At present, the consensus of international car companies is that they can only use local supply chains to compete with local car companies, because we are faster, more flexible and more cost-effective. ”
According to the Titanium Media App, at present, the customers of Black Sesame Intelligence's car rim include not only Geely, Dongfeng, Jiangqi, FAW, SAIC, etc., but also Bosch, Marelli, Cao Cao Travel, Jika Intelligence, Baolong Group, Jingwei Hengrun, JOYNEXT Zhixing, Sotorian, etc., have carried out a series of commercial cooperation in L2 and L3 ADAS and autonomous driving perception system solutions.
According to Yang Yuxin revealed to the titanium media app, it has been used in Lynk & Co 08, Dongfeng Yipai 007, Hechuang V09, etc., and more products equipped with black sesame smart chips will be launched in the next few months this year. Because there is a cycle at the fixed point, there needs to be a certain period.
Judging from the situation at the Beijing Auto Show, the competition for intelligent driving chips will only become more fierce in 2024. Yang Yuxin even drew a timetable for the competition, that is, the key node of domestic local automotive supply chain enterprises is "whether they can get on the car before 2025".
"It turns out that the supply chain of car companies is not open and does not want to change. Because of the iteration of technology, many original suppliers have to seek some upgrades, change some suppliers to introduce some new links, so car companies are willing to open the door of their supply chain to cooperate with startups. Yang Yuxin said to the titanium media app.
For car companies, he went on to say that it took a few years to run with you, give you the opportunity, cooperate with you, and mass-produce your things. Because it doesn't bring him more value, and at the same time adds a lot of investment.
And 2025 happens to be the time when "the leading enterprises in each vertical track have completed 0 to 1, and then they will develop rapidly from 1 to 100". Therefore, he believes that when the time comes, there will already be local leading enterprises running out of each key link, and when they are on the table, car companies will not want to change him, and the probability of people getting opportunities will be greatly reduced.
If you follow this logic, 2025 is just around the corner, and the competition for smart driving chips will only become more fierce in 2024. However, compared with before, this kind of fierceness will be more cost-oriented, more consumer-oriented, and more testing of business closed-loop capabilities.
(This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author | Han Jingxian, editor - Zhang Min)