Reducing costs and increasing efficiency will become the main theme in the next few years.
In the past year, the methodology and strategy of cost reduction in the field of intelligence has become a “hot topic” for automobile manufacturers to focus on.
Everyone is thinking about how to use technological innovation and management mode innovation to achieve large-scale cost reduction and efficiency.
Xiaopeng Motor has proposed that in the next year or two, the cost of making cars will directly affect the competitiveness of the market, and the hardware cost of self-driving must be reduced by half in 2024.
Musk delivered the same message at various speeches and conferences that reducing costs and increasing efficiency will be the main theme of Tesla in the coming years, with the ultimate goal of harvesting a larger global market by reducing the original price of new cars.
In the past 2023, Xilai has also made a lot of efforts in management efficiency and market services, such as layoffs and open power exchange.
Li Bin himself frankly said that reducing costs and increasing efficiency is currently a very high priority within Weilai.
In this environment, upstream suppliers are also looking for new solutions, not only to consider the cost reduction of the whole system for automotive customers, but also to meet the higher-level requirements of the market in product and technology iterations.
From the Beijing auto show, the smart driving track and the car chip track, this trend is more obvious.
Especially in the field of car chips, people no longer emphasize computing power in one dimension in product introduction and strategic deployment.
We find that advantages such as cost are paid more attention by chip players, especially the head companies, are looking for a cost-effective “cost-effective” route for car companies, so as to occupy more market highlands.
Cost reduction methodology, in the view of many local chip manufacturers, to save the development cycle for customers is essentially to reduce costs for car companies, and this approach is one of the advantages of domestic chips.
Zhang Xitong, director of Xichi Technology products and Marketing, told Auto Commune that as a local manufacturer, one of its advantages is that the speed of development and adaptation is much faster than that of foreign manufacturers.
At this stage, Xichi can help domestic enterprises save the development cycle of 5 to 6 months.
Most of the adaptation work can be done for the mainframe factory in advance, such as advanced information security methods.
We can start to do it before the car factory starts to move.
If the car factory chooses our plan, we can directly save this cycle.
Foreign chip factories may not be able to do this.
” The other is to support the customized needs of domestic customers.
Domestic car companies are actually different from foreign production.
Domestic competition is very fierce, so they need to do a lot of differentiated needs and need chips to support customization from the bottom up.
” At this point, Zhang Xitong believes that domestic chip companies have great advantages, and it is also one of the moats of the core car chip “dark horse”.
Wang Kai, founder, director and CEO of Core support Technology, also said that at present, automobile manufacturing has developed in a new direction, and everyone is thinking about how to reduce costs and increase efficiency for automobile companies, so that rigid demand can be integrated.
It is a good idea to solve the problem when the parking lines are gathered together.
In essence, it provides a chip scheme with a higher degree of integration, which belongs to horizontal function expansion, integrating multiple functions into fewer chips, so as to reduce the intelligent cost for automobile companies.
In the field of smart driving, the black sesame Huashan series A1000 is the first single SoC chip platform in China to support parking domain controllers, and it is also a relatively mature self-driving chip with the largest number of mass production companies in China.
At present, the A1000 is in a state of full mass production and delivery.
Luo Yi, former head of the self-driving and travel business group of Continental Group, once said that the integration of travel and parking is product-driven development, taking into account both functional experience and cost, and the integration of the two systems can reduce costs by about 50%.
This is very attractive to car companies.
Leapfrogging integration is also a challenge for chip companies.
Zhang Xitong of Xinchi Technology believes that this difficulty is mainly reflected in three aspects.
First, the integration of more functions, higher requirements for MCU processing capacity.
second, to consider security, cross-domain integration, to another domain, which may be power and chassis, so that higher security is definitely needed.
Third, some isolation mechanisms may need to be done between businesses, and products also need to support virtualization through a variety of hardware and software.
At present, the solution of mass production is the integration of cabin and berth, which is the most difficult among all the integrations.
With the integration of cabin and driver, what is the difficulty for chip suppliers? Sun Mingle, CTO of Xinchi Technology, believes that, first of all, the level of functional safety is different, and the level of functional safety of ADAS is higher.
In terms of the whole design, if it is done with a single chip, it can only be achieved if the whole chip can reach the ADAS level.
Second, the challenge to heat dissipation is higher, the original two controllers have their own boxes, stuffed together, power consumption together, thermal design is more difficult.
Finally, in terms of complexity, hardware decoupling is done, and the interaction is actually very limited.
When put together, the interactions are all inside the chip, and it becomes more efficient, but it is more difficult to run so many things on one processor at the same time, in terms of software, or software architecture, or the entire software architecture.
Zhaoyi Innovation, a technology company in China’s chip exhibition area, has been developing memory technology, MCU and sensor solutions in recent years.
At the scene of the auto show, the head of the company told the Auto Commune that they participated in the Beijing Auto Show for the first time, and the China Chip Alliance organized everyone to get together, which was a good opportunity to show off the latest technology collectively.
Chinese enterprises have their own methodology.
In fact, reducing costs for car companies is one of our moats.
Of course, for this moat to be sustainable and effective, on the one hand, it depends on technological innovation, on the other hand, it also depends on the cooperation with car companies.
” , 02, “computing power is king”, gone forever, more chip companies realize that at a time when car companies are seeking to reduce costs and increase efficiency, customers pay more attention to the comprehensive indicators of chip products, such as performance, price and power consumption.
The era of single-dimensional computing power and “computing power is king” is gone forever, and the performance-to-price ratio has become an important consideration for car companies.
In essence, heap computing is definitely not enough, it requires the cooperation of sensors and other hardware and software.
Take Tesla as an example.
At present, the “getting on the car” of the large model has become a hot topic, but the matching degree of the large model and the car chip directly affects the utilization rate of computing power.
Tesla specially designed the 144Tops algorithm for his own algorithm.
The reason why the performance of the force chip is better than that of the 500Tops chip is precisely because of the high degree of cooperation.
The timeline is further pushed forward.
Tesla’s self-developed HW3.
0 chip in 2018 has increased the performance of smart driving by as much as 20 times, but the computing power of a single chip is only 72tops.
Chen Liming, president of Horizon, also said that the inner rolls of smart driving tracks are becoming more and more intense, and everyone is under great pressure from mainframe factory rolls to suppliers.
This also forces Horizon to focus on developing cost-effective and efficient products, rather than just pursuing high computing power.
“cost optimization from a system point of view.
” In his view, the local optimization does not represent the overall optimization, the system is the best, we must consider how to optimize from the system point of view.
For players like Horizon, the main task is to reduce the cost of the system while improving the performance and user experience of the entire system.
Development costs, as well as system costs, are critical to the horizon.
Chen Shujie, vice president of Xinchi, also told the “Automobile Commune” that about three or four years ago, competitors were rolling “AI arithmetic”, but at that time, Xinchi did not follow the volume.
Now, everyone is actually doing the math pullback.
Xinchi focuses on the arithmetic power of L2 +, which is still the most practical calculation power.
“We didn’t go out first, wasted a lot of money, invested in R & D costs, and were more cost-effective.
In fact, people are now thinking, do all cars really need to achieve 8295 GPU computing power? ” With regard to chip cost reduction, Nanxin CEO Wang Shengyang also said that international chip companies have their own characteristics and advantages, and Chinese chip companies may not be able to simply copy the model of international manufacturers, but should be based on the present and build their own core competitive advantages.
For Chinese chip companies, in order to actively deal with the market competition and firmly maintain the market share in some advantageous areas, the most important point is applied innovation.
In Wang Shengyang’s view, in the past, most of the domestic chip companies made in-situ replacement products, such products in the past lack of core, can achieve faster replacement in customer systems, easier to quickly increase quantity.
However, if we only stay at “in-situ substitution”, domestic chip companies will not be able to really compete with foreign giants.
Especially when the whole market returns to a state of stable supply and full competition, Chinese chip companies can only work closely with automobile companies to develop more innovative products around the evolution trend of automotive system applications.
in order to lead the future development direction of the industry.
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