High-performance chips, intelligent overall solutions for vehicles and open-source operating platforms have been released simultaneously, making the domestic AI unicorn "madly powerful".

On July 29th, Dr. Yu Kai had his moment of glory in his professional career.

Despite being the former Executive Vice President of Baidu IDL and the Senior Director of Baidu Image Search, with remarkable achievements in the AI industry, he looked particularly impressive today.

“Today is the most important product launch event for Horizon in the past six years,” Yu Kai set the tone for the event.

Yu Kai then reported to the audience about the six-year achievements of Horizon: “Until today, Horizon has delivered more than 400,000 chips, and has more than 40 mass production projects in progress.”

This is an outstanding achievement indeed. It is worth noting that Horizon is currently one of the only three large-scale mass production dedicated ADAS chip manufacturers in the world. Moreover, winning the partnership with one of the top three new automakers and successfully integrating the ADAS chips into their vehicles is enough to prove the competitiveness of Horizon’s ADAS chips.

With a bunch of impressive achievements presented and the atmosphere set, Yu Kai took the opportunity to officially launch the Journey 5 chip. At the same event, the Mixtrix 5 full-scene intelligent central computing platform developed based on the Journey 5 chip was also unveiled.

So how does the J5 chip measure up? Let’s look at the specs. A single chip has 128 TOPS of AI computing power, 1283 FPS of the strongest computing performance, ultra-low power consumption of 30 watts, and support for up to 16 camera perception calculations. Yu Kai also stated that the 1283 FPS computing performance has already surpassed Nvidia’s latest Orin chip.The CPU of the Horizon Journey 5 chip uses an 8-core ARM Cortex-A55 and the AI computing unit uses a dual-core Horizon Bayesian BPU architecture. The release of the Journey 5 marks Horizon’s position as the only domestic supplier covering L2-L4 full-scenario intelligent vehicle chips.

In addition, Horizon has also created Domain Controller Device Matrix 5 based on four Journey 5 chips, with the highest computing power of 512 TOPS, which can meet the demands of multiple scenarios such as autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit. It can access 48 cameras, 4D imaging radar, lidar, ultrasound radar, and microphone arrays. As a supplier, Horizon will fully open reference designs to enable car companies to create better and faster hardware.

Currently, several Tier 1 companies have already partnered with Horizon and launched vehicle control samples based on Matrix 5. These companies include Continental, Neusoft Reach, Luxshare Precision, and Lianchuang Development.

Prospective partners for the initial release of the Journey 5 chip include SAIC Motor, Great Wall Motors, JMC, NIO, Changan Automobile, BYD, Naza Automobile, and Voyah.

In addition to the above products, Horizon has brought the Martix SuperDrive full-scenario intelligent solution for the whole vehicle. The solution includes intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and in-car and out-of-car linkage.

On the timeline, it is expected that by Q4 of this year, Horizon will be able to complete urban autonomous driving real-car demos, and by Q4 of next year, Horizon will complete the mass production SOP of the SuperDrive solution.

One more thing…

At the press conference, Horizon officially unveiled their open-source operating system TogetherOS, which is compatible with mainstream vehicle chip platforms including Horizon’s journey chips. With respect to operating systems, TogetherOS is compatible with Linux, Android, QNX, and HarmonyOS.

High-computing chips, reference designs for the intelligent hardware of entire vehicles, complete solutions for intelligent driving in all scenarios, open-source operating systems, and a thriving ecosystem and friend circle. Horizon’s content this time is definitely hard-core, but the foundation and core of all this is Journey 5 chips. High-computing chips give us the confidence to imagine the realization of intelligent driving and intelligent cabins. As Li Xiang said, with companies like Horizon, the future of China’s intelligent vehicles is assured.

The release of Journey 5 is a big step forward for Horizon’s development, as well as for the development of China’s intelligent vehicles.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.