Xpeng’s Turing chip has been successfully taped out, delivering three times the computing power of self-driving chips currently in use in a single chip.
Xpeng (NYSE:XPEV) has announced a major milestone for its homegrown AI (artificial intelligence) chips, confirming rumors that have been circulating for some time.
The Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker announced yesterday during the launch of its new model, the Mona M03, that the tape-out of its first AI chip, Turing, was successful on August 23rd.
He said the Turing chips will be used in Xiaopeng’s electric vehicles, robots and flying cars.
Tape-out is a technical term used in the field of integrated circuit design to refer to the process of converting a circuit design into a chip that can be produced on an assembly line.
After a successful tape-out, if the chip prototype passes subsequent testing, mass production can begin.
Xpeng has become the second local EV maker to announce progress in chip development, after Nio (NYSE: NIO).
Nio announced the successful tape-out of the Shenji NX9031 chip at its Nio IN 2024 Tech Day event in Shanghai on July 27.
Nio will unveil the Shenji NX9031 at Nio Day 2023 on December 23, 2023, and the chip will be used in its ET9 executive flagship sedan, with deliveries scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2025.
Xpeng didn’t say much about the technical details of the Turing chip, including the manufacturing process. Nio had previously said that the Shenji NX9031 chip was manufactured using a 5nm process.
The Turing chip is a purpose-built chip built for Level 4 autonomous driving functions, with a single chip that has three times the computing power of the autonomous driving chips Xpeng currently uses, He said at the event yesterday.
Although he did not directly mention it, the self-driving chip currently used in the Xpeng model is Nvidia’s Drive Orin X, which has a computing power of 254 TOPS (tera operations per second) in a single chip.
“We believe that only by conducting full-domain, full-stack research and development, including software and hardware, can we close the data loop and process massive amounts of data,” He said at the event yesterday.
He gave reasons why Xpeng is developing its own chips similar to those previously expressed by NIO founder, chairman and CEO William Li.
Most chips offered by vendors take into account the needs of various industries, but when Xpeng began designing the Turing chip, it was developed entirely with autonomous driving in mind and based on the needs of transformer models, he said.
The chip is exclusively suited for Xpeng products, including its support for large-scale AI models, He said.
The Turing chip is a highly customized chip, which makes it very efficient and keeps costs down, he said.
“We believe this will help Xpeng lay a very good foundation for the next generation of autonomous driving and robotics,” He said.
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