Cruise’s self-driving cars will soon feature homemade chips
Cruiseone of the divisions of General Motors, has just made an important decision. The company no longer wants to use chips produced by other companies in its autonomous vehicles. Cruise will thus produce his own chips.
According to Carl Jenkins, Cruise’s vice president of hardware engineering, the main reason for this decision is the high cost associated with buying chips from other companies. Jenkins reported that two years ago they spent a lot of money getting a GPU chip from a manufacturer. This manufacturer was NVIDIA. Cruise hadn’t been able to negotiate then because it wasn’t mass-producing self-driving vehicles yet.
Currently, Cruise’s technology is still in its experimental phase, and its operations are still limited. However, by manufacturing its own chips, it avoids dependence on other companies.
Cruise’s chips
According to Jenkins, 4 types of chips have already been developed by Cruise. The first chip is called Hortaand she was designed to take on the role of main brain of the car. Then there is the chip called Dunes who will take care of process data from sensors. A other chip will take care of process information from the radar. A final chip is still waiting to be unveiled.
The vehicle which will be equipped with these 4 chips will be the Cruise Origin. This is Cruise’s electric car with neither steering wheel nor pedals. The Cruise Origin will instead have 4 seats on board that face each other.
Securing the future of the Cruise Origin model
For the moment, we do not yet know the amount of the budget allocated to the development of Cruise’s chips. However, we know that the company hopes recover your investment once production is increased.
According to Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, the company’s internal chips will help Origin “reaching the cost sweet spot” by 2025. These chips would also make it viable to purchase fully autonomous vehicles for personal use.
It is thus possible that Cruise is considering offering the Origin to individuals in the future. Mary Barra, manager at GM, has also announced to the THESE of this year that they were thinking of selling personal self-driving cars by the middle of this decade.
SOURCE: Engadget
