Employees of the American company Cruise, which is a subsidiary of the automotive giant General Motors, have officially announced ambitious plans to create and manufacture their own chips for the vehicles of the future. Representatives of the “subsidiary” of GM said that they no longer want to rely on third-party processor manufacturers for a number of reasons, but the main problem is that the costs of acquiring chips from partner companies are too high – Karl Jenkins, vice president of hardware development at the company, admitted this. security.
“Two years ago we were paying huge amounts of money for GPUs from a reputable supplier for our cars. Now it’s time to take the future into our own hands,” Jenkins added.
It is worth noting that Cruise representatives in their press release only mention third-party manufacturers, but do not name specific companies whose chips turned out to be too expensive for the manufacturer. However, you can guess even without direct mention – we are talking about NVIDIA and its solutions for smart cars. It was the “green team” that two years ago began supplying its computing chips for Cruise projects, and then, apparently, the “daughter” of the automotive giant did not have such impressive volumes to bargain for the price. Now everything has changed, because Cruise is the first company in the United States to receive permission to charge for trips without a driver.
And although at the moment the business of unmanned vehicles, namely in this direction the company is working, is at a very early stage of development, in the foreseeable future it will be a huge market. Accordingly, Cruise decided to abandon NVIDIA so that in ten years, when driverless taxis become the norm, they would not lose the lion’s share of profits. Moreover, Jenkins said that Cruise has already developed four of its own chips, which should become the main “brains” of the smart cars of the future in the future. They are responsible for processing data from sensors and radars, control the multimedia system and more.
The company wants to use all these developments in Cruise Origin – this is a drone presented in 2020, which does not have a steering wheel and pedals in the cabin. Instead, there will be four seats inside the car, facing each other, and automation will be fully responsible for the trip itself. It is not yet entirely clear when Cruise Origin will go into full release, but the manufacturer should present its first own chips as early as 2025.
Source: Trash Box
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