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posted by hubie on Monday September 19 2022, @04:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the yeah-well-I'm-going-to-build-my-own-chips dept.

GM's Cruise is making its own chips for self-driving vehicles to save on costs:

GM's Cruise division doesn't want to rely on third-party manufacturers for the chips powering its autonomous vehicles — so, it's making its own. Based on what Carl Jenkins, the company's VP for Hardware Engineering, told Reuters, the main motivator for the switch is the lofty costs associated with paying for other companies' chips.

"Two years ago, we were paying a lot of money for a GPU from a famous vendor," Jenkins told the news organization, referring to NVIDIA. He explained that Cruise couldn't negotiate because it wasn't mass manufacturing autonomous vehicles just yet. [...]

Jenkins has revealed that Cruise had already developed four chips at this point, starting with Horta, which was designed to become the main brains of the vehicle. Dune will process data from sensors, while another chip will process information from the radar. Yet another one will be announced at a later date. These components will power the Cruise Origin, the self-driving electric shuttle the company first announced back in 2020. The Cruise Origin will have no steering wheel or pedals and will instead have four seats inside facing each other. It's intended to be used as a shareable vehicle that's on the road at all times, shuttling passengers to their destinations.

Company executives didn't say how much they spent on the chips' development, but they believe they could recoup their investment once Cruise starts scaling up production. [...] GM chief Mary Barra announced at CES this year that the automaker wants to sell personal autonomous vehicles by the middle of the decade.


Original Submission

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Why Cruise is Making its Own Chips, and a Lot More Besides 7 comments

The supply chain it needs simply doesn't exist, but that could work to GM's advantage:

Cruise never planned to make its own silicon. But in the quest to commercialize robotaxis — and make money doing it — those never planned pursuits can suddenly seem a lot more appealing.

Cruise realized that the price of chips from suppliers was too high, the parts were too big and the reliability of the third-party technology just wasn't there, Carl Jenkins, Cruise's vice president of hardware, told TechCrunch during a tour of the company's hardware lab last month.

Amid a hiring spree that began in 2019 and continued into 2020, Cruise doubled down on its own hardware, including its own board and sensors. The investment has helped the company develop smaller, lower cost hardware for its vehicles. It has also resulted in its first production board the C5, which is powering the current generation of autonomous Chevy Bolts.

When the company's purpose-built Origin robotaxi starts hitting the streets in 2023, it will be outfitted with the C6 board. That board will eventually be replaced with the C7 which will have Cruise's Dune chip. Dune will process all of the sensor data for the system, according to Cruise.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday September 19 2022, @07:12PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday September 19 2022, @07:12PM (#1272430) Journal

    While I appreciate that they want to serve chips in their self-driving cars, I'd prefer them not to be genetically modified. :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday September 19 2022, @10:23PM

      by TheGratefulNet (659) on Monday September 19 2022, @10:23PM (#1272462)

      yeah.

      and we call then french fries. NOT CHIPS.

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 19 2022, @08:42PM (2 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday September 19 2022, @08:42PM (#1272442) Journal

    I keep hearing of AI drivers making strange mistakes that no human driver would have made. Such as, mistaking the full moon for a yellow traffic light. Then there are all these caveats and warnings that the human in the driver's seat has to be ready at all times to take back control in an instant, in case the AI falters. If the person has to do that, might just as well do the driving.

    • (Score: 2) by srobert on Monday September 19 2022, @10:31PM (1 child)

      by srobert (4803) on Monday September 19 2022, @10:31PM (#1272463)

      Mistaking the moon for a yellow traffic light is actually a mistake that I imagine a human driver could make in a split second, like when returning one's gaze from the rear view to the windshield. Of course, after the split second is up he will notice his error, whereas the AI might continue under the misperception until a human corrects it.
      But the mistake that the human driver makes, which the AI does not, is believing that that same yellow traffic light means that he should stomp on the accelerator to get through the light before it turns red. That seems like a more egregious error to me.
      I don't expect AI to live up to its hype in the next 5 years. But I bet it will in 20. Eventually cars that drive themselves won't kill millions each decade like humans drivers do.
      But then again that's not what scares me. What scares me is what to do with millions of people who drive for a living. Are they supposed to just lie down and starve to death? If driving has been automated, then probably so has almost anything else they could do to earn a living.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2022, @02:31AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2022, @02:31AM (#1272495)

        > ... what to do with millions of people who drive for a living.

        Good luck trying to convince them to not procreate, but I believe that is a sensible approach for many people with limited resources. Be green, wear a condom or stay on the pill!

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