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Cadence presented a lot of
information about the OpenVX
standard, and how it has complete
support on the Tensilica Vision P5
and P6 cores. See my earlier post See
Further by Standing on the Shoulders
of...OpenVX.
Linley also had some
information on specific
automotive processors:
Mobileye EyeQ3 dominates ADAS
vision processors today. EyeQ4 rated
at 2 trillion operations per second
(TOPS) at just 3W. EyeQ5 expected
to sample in 2018 with production in
2020, delivering 12 TOPS at 3W. One
interesting wrinkle, that Linley didn't
mention, is the EyeQx designs are
MIPS-based (I don't think Intel was a
MIPS licensee and the future of MIPS
is unclear with Apple moving away
from Imagination GPUs).
NVIDIA is developing a single-chip
solution of their DRIVEPX2 called
Xavier that combines 8 custom CPUs,
512-shader Volta GPU delivering
>3TFLOPS, new integer only 30 TOPS
vision processor, and a 30W power
budget (sampling late this year and
could be in 2020 cars).
NXP has a reference design called
BlueBox with a vision-processing
chip and an 8-core A-57 and a 40W
power budget. Qualcomm is expected
to boost R&D in this area. I covered
BlueBox in passing in the DVCon
Europe keynote.
Renasas has a new automotive
platform called Autonomy, although
Linley didn't mention it. That's
because it was announced between
the conference and me writing this
post, that's how fast things are
moving.
Lexus Lane Valet
It's way past April 1, so a bit late for a
prank video, but Lexus came up with
a new feature for advanced driver
automation, with its lane valet:
earth-shattering announcement, but
instead that it was really a bit boring.
It was boring because everyone said
the same thing. That in itself is a
story. The future is going to be cars
with lots of sensors (lots of cameras,
because they are cheap, some radar,
some lidar) and high-performance
chips that perform the sensor fusion,
do the vision recognition, and handle
the policy aspects of driving.
A decade ago, every presentation in
EDA opened with a graph illustrating
the design gap, before going on to
show how whatever product was
being presented would close it. Today,
every automotive presentation opens
with a picture showing the complexity
of future automotive electronics. Here
are a selection from the day:
Linley's opening keynote gave a good
high-level overview of the space.
He started off talking about how
autonomous technology drives many
markets such as planes and drones.
But really it is all about cars (and
trucks, but they are mostly just big
cars). He covered a lot of the basics,
such as SAE autonomous mode levels,
that I have covered in numerous posts
here already. Since Linley Group talks
to a lot more people than I do, it is
interesting to see what he considers
the timescales for introduction:
Level 3 vehicles to debut this year
in high-end ($50K+) vehicles and in
trucks
Level 3 BOM cost will drop below
$5K by 2022, and market may be
lubricated by reduction in insurance
cost
Level 4 vehicles in 2022 in high-
end brands and commercial vehicles
(taxis/uber)
True level 5 may take 10 years to
develop
I think that everything may happen
faster than this, since progress is
being made so fast. It is not much
more than a decade ago that
autonomous vehicles couldn't go
ten miles and required so much
electronics that they required extra
air conditioners on the roof. Deep
learning has only become dominant
in the last five years, perhaps fewer.
Fully autonomous trucks have been
in use in open cast mining for some
years. Planes can land themselves,
although the automotive people all
claim that there are several orders of
magnitude more code in a high-end
car than a plane. That may be true,
but there is also probably a reason we
let 15 years olds behind the wheel of
a car but not a 777.
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