GM’s Cruise unit is developing four of its own chips for its self-driving vehicles such as Origin being deployed by 2025 instead of using a pricey GPU from Nvidia, according to a Reuters report.
The trend toward custom chips is already well entrenched across various industry segments. For example, Apple most recently designed its A16 Bionic for the iPhone 14 Pro and Google came up with the Tensor G2 processor for the next Pixel 7 line.
Tesla did the same when it ditched Nvidia for custom chips for its vehicles. Hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure design some of their own to lower costs or to perform specialized AI processing.
“Many companies in various industries are now designing their own chips,” said Jack Gold, analyst at J. Gold Associates. “Price may be one reason but may not be the only reason…General purpose off-the-shelf chips often are not optimized for what companies need.”
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Carl Jenkins, head of Cruise hardware, told Reuters how its custom operation developed. “Two years ago, we were paying a lot of money for a GPU from a famous vendor,” he said, an apparent reference to Nvidia.
Cruise faced no ability to negotiate on price with Nvidia because it only needed a small volume of GPUs. “That’s why I said, okay, then we have to take control of our own destiny,” Jenkins also told Reuters.
Cruise has developed four in-house chips thus far, including Horta, the main brain of a car, Dune, to process data from sensors, a chip for radar and one more to be announced later. They are being fabricated by an unnamed Asian company.
In addition to costing much less, the chips and the sensors they communicate with will reduce power and help increase driving range for Cruise vehicles. GM didn’t say how much it has invested in its own chip development, but Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said customer chips would help Origin “hit that sweet spot from a cost perspective” to help average customers afford autonomous vehicles. The Origin concept was first unveiled in spring 2021 as a self-driving vehicle with no pedals or steering wheel.
The Horta chip is based on an ARM instruction set, but Cruise is “closely looking at RISC-V because they are open source and it has a lot of benefits,” Ann Gui, silicon lead for Cruise, told Reuters.
Gold said there are good tools available to help companies create custom chips although it remains fairly expensive and complex to do so. And, like GM, he said companies are looking at RISC-V as an alternative to ARM, but added, “RISC-V still has a long way to go to achieve parity with ARM capabilities and functionality.”
More companies will be doing their own custom designs, Gold predicted, although he said smaller companies need to be wary of possible supply chain delays with fabs that build them.
As the chiplet world emerges, it is possible to have chips that are “hybrid custom,” Gold said, where the main processing chip might come from Intel or Nvidia or Qualcomm, with a custom chiplet added that is proprietary for a certain company.
With any custom design, companies need to find a way to certify quality of the design, know how to keep them upgraded and assure the OS runs properly, Gold said.