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Mobileye Announces EyeQ Ultra: A Level 4 Self-Driving System In A Single SoC
Aimed for a 2025 release, the EyeQ Ultra is Mobileye's most ambitious SoC yet, and not just for performance. In fact, as a site that admittedly rarely covers automotive-related announcements, it's the relative lack of performance that makes today's announcement so interesting to us. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here; so let's start with the basics.
The EyeQ Ultra is Mobileye's seventh generation automotive SoC, and is designed to enable Level 4 autonomous driving – otherwise known as "high automation" level driving. Though not quite the holy grail that is Level 5 (full automation), L4 is the more immediate goal for automotive companies working on self-driving cars, as it a degree of automation that allows for cars to start, and if necessary, safely stop themselves. In practice, level 4 systems are likely to be the basis of robo-taxis and other fixed-location vehicles, where such self-driving cars will only need to operate across a known and well-defined area under limited weather conditions.
Mobileye already has the hardware to do L4 automation today, however that hardware is comprised of six to eight EyeQ chips working together. For the research and development phase that's more than sufficient – just making it all work is quite a big deal, after all – but as L4 is now within Mobileye's grasp, the company is working on the next step of productization of the technology: making it cheap enough and compact enough for mass market vehicles. And that's where the EyeQ Ultra comes in.
At a high level, the EyeQ Ultra is intended to be Mobileye's first mass market autonomous driving SoC, To accomplish this, Mobileye is designing a single-chip L4 driving system – that is, all of the necessary processing hardware is contained within a single high-end SoC. So when attached to the appropriate cameras and sensors, the EyeQ Ultra – and the Ultra alone – would be able to driving a car as per L4 standards.
The EyeQ Ultra includes 12 RISC-V cores and various accelerators. Intel acquired Mobileye in 2017 and is planning an IPO.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday January 06 2022, @01:18AM (2 children)
I enjoy surviving. Airplanes typically have co-pilots for a reason. A single SoC, single system, being in charge of it all is just dangerous. Minimum three with consensus algorithms. I want two out of three robotic systems to agree to kill me, thank you.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 06 2022, @05:42PM (1 child)
Over 90% of all auto accidents are from human error, and it can be some other car that runs a red light and t-bones you. It doesn't matter how good you drive, over 90% of drivers are witless morons reading their email or Facebook while they "drive".
When all cars drive themselves, vehicular carnage will drop by 90%. You seem to be poor at simple math.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 06 2022, @08:02PM
What did any of that have to do with redundancy of critical systems? I guess my math is rather simple. Two control systems in a hot-spare setup are better than one, in case one fails. Three control systems are better than two with consensus algorithms, in case there is a disagreement.