Image: Mobileye
Mobileye, an autonomous driving technology company owned by Intel, announced the latest version of its EyeQ system-on-a-chip (SoC) for vehicles, the EyeQ Ultra, on Tuesday at CES 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The company says the EyeQ Ultra equals the performance of 10 of its EyeQ5 chips in a single package that is capable of 176 trillion operations per second (TOPS), putting it directly in competition with self-driving technologies being developed by the likes of electric vehicle (EV) pioneer Tesla and GPU giant Nvidia.
Mobileye called the new chip “the most advanced, highest-performing system-on-chip purpose-built for autonomous driving.”
EyeQ Ultra utilizes an array of four classes of proprietary accelerators, each built for a specific task. These accelerators are paired with additional CPU cores, ISPs and GPUs in a highly efficient solution capable of processing input from two sensing subsystems – one camera-only system and the other radar and lidar combined – as well as the vehicle’s central computing system, the high-definition map and driving policy software. At a mere 176 TOPS, the EyeQ Ultra is much more efficient than other AV solutions, delivering the necessary performance and price-point required for consumer-level AVs.
The EyeQ Ultra is slated to enter production in late 2023, so we probably won’t see it powering autonomous driving features in consumer automobiles until 2025 at the earliest.
Mobileye claims that vehicles equipped with this new chip will be capable of Level 4 autonomous driving — which represents a car’s ability to drive without human input under specific conditions. And if that’s not enough, the company also boasts “extreme power efficiency with zero performance sacrifices.”
Mobileye has supplied more than a hundred million chips to much of the automotive industry over several decades, with its EyeQ line of products found under the hoods of cars from 13 of the 15 largest automakers in the world, including BMW, Ford, and Nissan.
Even Tesla sourced Mobileye chips for its Autopilot system at one time, before severing ties with the chipmaker back in 2016 and setting out to develop its own autonomous driving hardware.
At CES, the company also announced a smaller, more efficient successor to its EyeQ4 advanced driver assistance chip, the EyeQ6L, alongside the EyeQ Ultra. The EyeQ6L is just 55 percent the size of its predecessor and is ideal for cars with Level 2 driver assistance systems.
Back in April, Mobileye also announced a new deal with Udelv to produce over 35,000 driverless delivery vehicles, called Transporters, by 2028.
