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Smart-driving chips: the weapon of choice in China’s EV tech war
Carmakers strive for more control over computing hardware to reduce reliance on Nvidia and Horizon Robotics
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Howard Liuin Beijing
A new front has opened in China’s electric-vehicle tech war as carmakers design their own smart-driving chips, turning custom silicon into the industry’s weapon of choice in the world’s largest auto market.
The latest salvo came on Monday after Li Auto unveiled the Mach M100, a 5-nanometre artificial-intelligence chip tailored for autonomous driving.
Designed for the carmaker’s new L9 Livis SUV model, the chip displayed single-unit computing power of 1,280 trillion operations per second (TOPS) – a metric of how fast an AI brain can process incoming data, Li Auto said. It achieved a highly efficient 82 per cent utilisation rate, the firm added.
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The announcement followed a string of breakthroughs by its rivals.
Weeks earlier, world-leading EV maker BYD debuted its Xuanji A3, a 4nm smart-driving chip now in mass production. Capable of supporting Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous-driving functions, a trio of Xuanji A3 chips working in tandem can deliver more than 2,100 TOPS of processing power, the company said.
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Higher TOPS allow a vehicle’s computers to make split-second driving decisions by simultaneously crunching feeds from various sources such as radar and lidar sensors.
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