On July 29, Horizon held a press conference in Jiading, and Dr. Yu Kai ushered in the highlight of his career on this night.
This press conference was of great significance to Yu Kai. Although he was the former Executive Vice Dean of Baidu IDL and the Senior Director of Baidu Image Search Product, and had achieved remarkable results in the AI industry, he looked particularly handsome on stage tonight.
Many Tier 1 executives, including those from SAIC, Ideal, Changan and mainland, Dongsoft Ruichi and other companies, were present in the audience to support him. They didn’t come on word of mouth, but had already established partnerships with Horizon.
“Today is the most important press conference for Horizon in the past 6 years,” Yu Kai set the tone for today’s press conference.
Then, Yu Kai announced the report card of the past six years to the outside world. As a start-up, Horizon has created many firsts: China’s first deep neural network chip company, the first company to launch a production-level chip for vehicles, and the only supplier in the world to provide production-level ADAS chips. Currently, the delivery volume of Horizon’s vehicle-grade chips has exceeded 400,000, and over 40 models of mass-produced vehicles have been delivered with these chips.
In this summary, Yu Kai particularly thanked Changan Automobile. For Horizon, Changan Automobile is not just an ordinary customer. Last year, the latter used the Horizon Journey 2 chip on the UNI-T model. Although the chip was ultimately used for the development and application of intelligent cabins, it made the outside world pay attention to this local chip company and gave Horizon the courage to break through the fog and stride forward.
Another breakthrough was this year’s cooperation with Ideal. The collaboration between the “Phoenix and Phoenix Singing” of this “newcomer” was very close. Engineers from both sides often worked together until midnight and spent even more time solving problems than spending time with their families.
Finally, the sales of the 2021 Ideal One, which is equipped with the Journey 3 chip, proved everything. In the just-passed July, the sales volume of the Ideal One reached 8,589, becoming the first new energy vehicle model to break the 8,000 sales volume mark. Domestic chips not only did not become a shackle affecting sales, but also helped to push the new Ideal One to new heights.Is the New Product “Hard” Enough?
Currently, intelligent vehicles are experiencing a leap from L2 to L3, and the precision and resolution of sensors for autonomous driving are increasingly high, resulting in the doubling of data, requiring higher chip computing power. Although the Journey 3 is a high-performance chip with AI computing capability of 422 FPS, it still appears powerless for L4 or even L5 autonomous driving.
At this point, Journey 5 chip has successfully flown and been released, which seems just right.
Is this chip “hard” enough? Compared with Orin and Mobileye EyeQ5, does it have the ability to triumph?
Yukai believes that there are three major problems in today’s intelligent driving computing solutions:
- Computing Power Waste
- Ecological Deficiency
- Data Risk
When the Journey 5 chip was launched three years ago, the greatest goal was to solve these three pain points.
Among them, the computing power waste problem is the most prevalent. The computing power of the NIO ET7 is up to 1016 TOPS, but the current on-sale models only have 2.5 TOPS computing power, and NIO still developed NOP based on 2.5 TOPS. Therefore, the demand for computing power is not that significant until we achieve true high-level autonomous driving or before the driving task is wholly transferred to the machine.
The computing power of Journey 5 chip is 128 TOPS, which doesn’t seem as impressive as Orin’s 254 TOPS in terms of computing power. However, Horizon never believed in the “power-only” theory. Although the computing power of Journey 3 is only 5 TOPS, its computing performance is very high. Therefore, in the same scene, Journey 3 with only 5 TOPS can achieve nearly half of Xavier’s ability of 30 TOPS.
Using the self-developed third-generation dual-core BPU Bayes architecture, the Voyage 5 achieves large-scale heterogeneous process computing, as well as a high-flexibility, large-concurrency data bridge, and a very large on-chip bandwidth. This means that Voyage 5 can perform calculations at a very high efficiency while reducing power consumption and latency.
Under excellent architectural design, the actual computational performance of Voyage 5 can reach 1,283 FPS. To put this in perspective, let’s compare it to Tesla’s HW 3.0 chip, which currently has the highest computing power of any vehicle on the market. Its maximum compute power is 72 TOPS, but its computational performance reaches 2,100 FPS. Additionally, Voyage 5 consumes only 30 W of power, which is better than HW 3.0’s 72 W, and Voyage 5’s delay is controlled within 60 milliseconds. A delay of just a few dozen milliseconds can cause vastly different results during high-speed driving.
Voyage 5 supports up to 16 camera inputs, 10 more than Voyage 3, and also supports 2 front pre-ethernet interfaces, 4 CAN-FD interfaces, and 2 PCle 3.0 interfaces.
In terms of safety, Voyage 5 has an isolated secure design and has obtained ISO 26262 ASIL-B functional safety product certification in July of this year. Additionally, Voyage 5 has an encryption engine, and its system based on the Voyage 5 chip meets ASIL-D level safety requirements.
Therefore, when we fully analyze this chip, we can understand why Yu Kai was so proud of its achievement on the 29th. Horizon has become the only and one of three global chip suppliers to cover L2-L4 ADAS.
After playing the promotional video for the Journey 5 chip, Yu Kai pulled out a “brick” and joked that it was even bigger than his face. With laughter from the audience, Yu Kai began to introduce this “brick”.
This is their second set of “kung fu” – Matrix 5. The high-performance chip of Journey 5 is only the underlying foundation, and how the upper level is built will depend on how the car company wants to play.
Based on Journey 5, Matrix 5 has a single computing power of 512 TOPS and supports up to 48 camera inputs, 4D imaging radar, lidar and microphone array inputs.
If the car company is financially strong enough, it can even use two Matrix 5 chips to achieve terrifying computing power data of 1,024 TOPS by splicing them together.
In short, the horizon reference design provides open hardware configuration and is highly customizable, providing full-stack support from chips to algorithms to tool chains to help car companies quickly build hardware and efficiently develop software.
At the press conference, Horizon announced that four Tier 1 companies have developed domain controllers based on Matrix 5: Continental, Luxshare, Neusoft Reach and Liancheng Ventures.
With the powerful Matrix 5, Horizon has the confidence to connect the entire scene ADAS and intelligent cockpit. Therefore, the Matrix SuperDrive is officially released.
The Matrix SuperDrive all-scenario intelligent solution for the entire vehicle covers high-speed driving scenarios, urban driving scenarios, low-speed parking scenarios, and smart interaction. From high-speed road right-of-way decision-making, autonomous navigation to low-speed memory parking, dynamic path planning, and voice-controlled driving, and driver fatigue relief, the Matrix SuperDrive has it all.
Moreover, we won’t have to wait too long for Matrix SuperDrive. In Q4 this year, Horizon will achieve urban autonomous driving real-car demos. By Q2 next year, partners will be able to complete domain controller production, and by Q4 next year, Matrix SuperDrive will be in mass production SOP.
In addition to powerful chips, algorithms, development tool chains, and whole vehicle intelligent solutions, Yu Kai also brought Horizon’s one more thing – the open-source operating system TogetherOS – to this press conference.
TogetherOS is built on the secure microkernel architecture of seL4, which not only achieves upward compatibility but also downward compatibility. It is compatible not only with Horizon chips but also with Nvidia and Qualcomm chips. It is also compatible with Android, Zebra, Linux, QNX, and Hongmeng operating systems.
The birth of TogetherOS is dedicated to creating the “greatest common denominator” of China’s operating ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Horizon will also be highly open and open-source, inviting partners to create an ecosystem together. At present, TogetherOS has partnered with several enterprises such as AutoCore, Zebra, Xiongshi, and Great Wall.
Horizon’s “Friends Circle”
Suppliers of chips, algorithms and development toolchains, Horizon Robotics suddenly said their positioning is Tier 2, standing behind the automakers. This is not hard to understand, though the people who control everything are often not in the foreground.
In this conference, Horizon Robotics spent a lot of time introducing their partners and customers. They even invited the customers of the Journey 5 chip onto the stage one by one. This wasn’t just “hype” in business, but rather real cooperation. Currently, several vehicle models have begun their pre-research work for Journey 5 chips, and more models will carry the domestically produced chip in the future. SAIC Roewe RX5 will become the first to “eat crab”.
And Yu Kai repeatedly emphasized that the corporate culture of Horizon Robotics is “tolerant of loneliness” and “integrated altruism”.
Tolerating loneliness is the fundamental principle of Horizon Robotics’ survival and development. In the early stages of the company’s establishment, when there were no orders, no one knew what the future would be like. They spent a lot of time doing difficult yet correct things.
Integrated altruism is the most core value of Horizon Robotics in its subsequent collaborations.I once had a conversation with the ADAS department of Ideal Automotive and gained a deep understanding. Here are the exact words: “The cooperation with Mobileye is too closed and inefficient. Sometimes when we give feedback on an issue, it takes a long time to receive a reply after sending an email. But now, working with Horizon and developing our own AD, we can directly give feedback when there is a problem, and even have engineers accompany us in the car and make code changes on site.”
“A group of idealistic scientists are providing comprehensive stewardship services for car companies, which is why more and more OEMs are choosing Horizon.”
Opportunities and Challenges
Horizon appears to have seized the opportunity by launching its own flagship product during the industry’s rapid development and seeking multiple collaborations. However, the Yu Kai team is still cautiously moving forward with a “thin ice” mentality, because looking back at these collaborations seems to lack a “breakthrough point.”
To be honest, the “breaking the circle effect” brought by traditional OEMs such as SAIC and Changan is far inferior to the three major new forces. And both Wei Lai and Li Xiang have already stated directly or indirectly that they will be using Orin chips on their next-generation flagship models. So, how should Horizon respond to the “strangling competition” that is expected to intensify in the future, after missing the opportunity to be on the flagship models of this round of new forces?
Generally speaking, two factors determine success, subjective and objective.
Mobileye’s EyeQ5 chip chose JiKe 001 for its first launch, while Orin also chose Ideal and WeiLai’s ET7 for its first launch. There is no doubt that the main battlefield for intelligent cars is in China. In addition to the three major new forces, traditional independent brands in urgent need of transformation and rising second-tier new forces also need high-performance chips to improve overall performance and change the market structure.
Subjectively, taking more local OEMs towards intelligent transformation is a crucial means for Horizon Robotics to reverse the game, which includes SAIC, NIO, Changan, and BYD. Among them, BYD attracts the most attention from the outside world. In the three-electric field, BYD is the most recognized by users in terms of independent intellectual property rights, market performance, and user reputation. However, the only criticism from the outside world is its poor performance in intelligence. If BYD’s ADAS performance can make significant progress in this cooperation, it will actively promote the improvement of Horizon’s reputation and the acquisition of more markets.
Besides, this is a mutually beneficial process. If car companies such as NIO choose to cooperate with NVIDIA and Mobileye at this time, regardless of cost, their priority in the cooperation list of the other party is likely to be unable to compete with Weilipeng. On the contrary, choosing Horizon can achieve higher efficiency in cooperation.
Objectively, even if the three new forces have all stated that they will adopt NVIDIA’s Orin chip, the final outcome has not yet been determined. According to various sources, the delivery time of the Orin chip has not been confirmed yet. If car companies believe that choosing to cooperate with Horizon can make research and development faster and better, temporary replacement of the Weicheng 5 is not out of the question.
In addition, in the prospectus of Ideal Motors, it shows that Ideal Motors will launch a pure electric SUV based on the Whale and Shark platforms in 2023. Meanwhile, NIO also has plans to build a mid-to-low-end brand. For these upcoming models, they will inevitably be aimed at L4, and combined with factors such as cost and research and development efficiency, the possibility of using domestic chips still exists.
When the opportunity comes, we should seize it. When there is no opportunity, we should strive for it. Whether it is an OEM or a Horizon, mutual achievement can promote the prosperity of the intelligent automobile industry.
On the Journey
In the past, when talking about the intelligent cockpit chip, we would only think of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. When it comes to the autonomous driving chip, we think of Mobileye and NVIDIA. Now, I think it is necessary for you to add Horizon, as they have become a new force that cannot be ignored in the field of intelligent vehicles.
“Not making mass-produced hardware, not making bundled software, not doing closed solutions.” This is Horizon’s claim, and the goal is to help automakers build better systems. To give a man a fish is to feed him for a day, but to teach him to fish is to feed him for a lifetime.
Similarly, some may say that Horizon “came too late,” as orders for Orin are pouring in. But when a technology company has been cultivating a battlefield of increment for a long time, where is the “late”?
Moreover, for many automakers who are transforming, Horizon is not just an additional option. It can provide them with a convenient experience of moving in and an opportunity to develop more market-oriented models together.
Horizon is a team of scientists who take changing the future of travel as their responsibility. They have been working for six years and aim to overturn the automotive industry of the last 100 years through lines of code. Perhaps one day, this team that has embarked on a journey will be able to write a chapter on China’s AI industry on the horizon that lies before us.
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.