According to reports, General Motors’ self-driving division Cruise has begun independent development of chips for self-driving cars, the chip is expected to begin deployment in 2025.
On Tuesday, local time, the company’s executives said its goal is to drive down vehicle costs and increase the scale of production. Cruise is now copying Tesla’s path by gradually abandoning Nvidia’s chips and instead starting to produce its own custom chips to power its vehicles.
Carl Jenkins, Cruise’s head of hardware, said, “Two years ago, we paid a lot of money to a well-known CPU supplier.” Apparently, he was referring to NVIDIA, the leading supplier of graphics processing units, or GPUs. He said during a press tour of Cruise’s R&D center in San Francisco, “Because our demand is so small, we don’t have the ability to negotiate prices with each other. It was simply not possible for us to negotiate on price. So we decided that we needed to take control of our own destiny.”
Cruise executives this week revealed the first details about its custom chips that will power its Origin self-driving vehicles without human driver-controlled devices such as pedals or steering wheels.
Jenkins said the in-house chip development will require a large investment, but scaling up vehicle production will help make up for those investments. He declined to say how much the company is investing in the project.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt previously said the custom chips will help Origin significantly reduce costs in 2025, and he said it will be possible for individuals to buy self-driving cars from then on. Earlier this year, GM CEO Mary Barra said they would develop “personal self-driving cars” by the middle of this decade.
So far, Cruise has developed four internal chips, including a computing chip called Horta, which will act as the vehicle’s main brain, Dune, which processes data from sensors, a chip for radar, and one that will be announced later.
These sensors and computing chips will also reduce power consumption and help improve the range of these electric vehicles.
Gartner chip analyst Gaurav Gupta (Gaurav Gupta) said automakers are increasingly trying to design chips and systems in-house to have greater control over product development and the supply chain. But it’s not an easy thing to do, so whether they can succeed is still a difficult question to answer,” he said.
Ann Gui, head of chips at Cruise, revealed that the Horta chip is an ARM-based processor, as it was when the development of the chip began two years ago. But we’re also looking closely at RISC-V because they’re open source and have a lot of benefits,” she said. ARM and RISC-V are competing for instruction set architectures that are the basis for building the chip and defining what kind of software can run on it. She also revealed that the company is working with an Asian chipmaker to mass-produce its custom chips, but she did not disclose the name of the chipmaker.
