[Automotive Materials Network] On April 21, BYD and Horizon officially announced that they have reached a fixed-point cooperation. BYD will equip some of its models with Horizon's high-performance, high-power autonomous driving chip Journey 5 to create an integrated solution for parking and realize high-level automatic driving. driving function. According to the plan, BYD models equipped with Horizon Journey 5 will be launched in mid-2023 at the earliest.
Horizon said that this cooperation is a new progress in actual business cooperation between the two parties after BYD invested in Horizon and reached a strategic cooperation with Horizon. BYD has also become the first car company to officially announce that it is equipped with the Horizon Journey 5 chip. In the future, the Horizon Journey series chips will be installed on a wider range of BYD models.
Prior to this, BYD has announced a cooperation with NVIDIA in intelligent driving technology. From the first half of 2023, BYD will be equipped with NVIDIA's DRIVE HyPErion platform on some of its new energy vehicles to realize intelligent driving and intelligent parking of vehicles. It can be seen that, as the first auto company in the world to give up the pure fuel vehicle business, BYD is constantly increasing the reserve of intelligent driving.
Jiemian News learned that Journey 5 is Horizon's third-generation vehicle-grade product. The AI computing power of a single chip can reach up to 128TOPS. It is a large computing power chip for L4 high-level autonomous driving. Together with the Journey 2 launched in 2019 and the Journey 3 launched in 2020, Horizon has become the only full-scenario vehicle smart chip solution provider covering L2 to L4 in China.
When Journey 5 was launched last year, SAIC, Great Wall Motor, Jiangqi Group, Ideal Motor, Changan Automobile, BYD, Nezha Automobile, and Dongfeng Lantu were on the list of intended partners for the first mass production of Horizon, and served as their platform. The achievement of the fixed-point cooperation between BYD and Horizon is a substantial step to promote the large-scale mass production of Horizon Journey 5, and the prelude to the mass production of domestically produced 100 TOPS-level high-power chips has also begun.
At present, the shipment of Horizon Journey chips has exceeded 1 million, and more than 45 models have been installed as front-loading points, and more than 100 ecological partners have been established. Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon, said, "Horizon is the only company in China that has achieved mass production of automotive-grade AI chips."
According to statistics, Changan UNI-T, Changan UNI-K, Chery Ant, Zhiji Automobile, GAC AION Y, GAC Trumpchi GS4 Plus, Dongfeng Lantu FREE, JAC Sihao QX have been announced to be equipped with Horizon Journey series chips. , SAIC MAXUS MIFA concept car, 2021 ideal ONE, new Haval H9 and other models.
It is worth noting that for a long time, foreign chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and Mobileye have controlled key technologies, and domestic car companies have faced the problem of "stuck neck" all the year round. However, this pattern is being broken, and domestic chip manufacturers represented by Horizon are rising rapidly, especially in the layout of large computing power chips.
Shan Jizhang, CEO of Black Sesame Intelligence, revealed at the recent electric vehicle 100-person meeting that 2022 will be the year of mass production of domestically produced large-scale computing power chips. The company is planning to launch the A2000 chip, which is the first product in China to surpass the performance of Nvidia's Orin autonomous driving chip. As a benchmark product, NVIDIA Orin can achieve 200TOPS computing performance per second.
