UNITED STATES: According to officials, Cruise, the self-driving division of General Motors (GM.N), has developed its processors for self-driving cars that will be used by 2025 to reduce costs and increase production.
By transitioning from Nvidia Corp’s (NVDA.O) products to custom processors to power their vehicles, Cruise is modelling its strategy after that of Tesla (TSLA.O).
Carl Jenkins, the head of Cruise Hardware, reportedly alluded to Nvidia, a significant supplier of graphics processing units, or GPUs, when he told Reuters that his company paid a lot of money for a GPU from a well-known vendor two years ago.
The unique chips that will power Cruise executives’ Origin vehicle, which has no pedals or steering wheel, were revealed this week for the first time.
According to Jenkins, scaling up the production of cars that use various chips will allow for financial recovery of the costs associated with in-house chip development. He declined to disclose how much the business was spending on the initiative.
According to Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, personal ownership of autonomous vehicles will be feasible starting in 2025 when the Origin “hits that sweet spot from a cost viewpoint,” thanks to the custom chips. This comes after GM CEO Mary Barra said earlier this year that the company would have a “personal autonomous vehicle” by the middle of the next decade.
According to Jenkins, Cruise has so far created four of its own chips: Horta, the computer that serves as the vehicle’s brain, and Dune, which analyzes sensor data.
In addition to reducing power usage, the sensors and computing chips would assist extend the driving range.
“To have more control over product development and supply chains, automakers are increasingly attempting to build processors and systems internally,” Gaurav Gupta, a semiconductor analyst at Gartner, said.
According to Ann Gui, Cruise’s silicon lead, the Horta device was built using an ARM CPU because that was what was available when chip development began two years ago.
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