China’s chip supplier Horizon Robotics expected to ship 1 million chips in 2021

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Horizon Robotics said earlier this week its automotive smart chip shipments are anticipated to reach 1 million units this year, up from 160,000 pieces for the year of 2020.

The Chinese chip provider will launch a new generation of smart driving chips “Journey 5” in 2021 and “Journey 5P” in 2022. These two automotive chips will support 16+ cameras, delivering computing power of 96 TOPS and 128 TOPS respectively, and featuring power consumption of 20W and 25W, according to Huang Chang, co-founder of Horizon Robotics, and Zhang Yufeng, vice president and general manager of intelligent driving product line of Horizon Robotics.

Photo credit: Horizon Robotics

The startup said its “Journey 6” chip, which is in the works, will deliver computing power of over 400 TOPS and support Level 4/Level 4+ autonomous driving features.

Currently, autonomous driving is demanding increasingly high computing power for chips. An autonomous car can generate an average of 600-1000 terabytes of data per day, and the volume of data created by 2,000 autonomous cars will exceed the world's daily data usage in 2015, namely, 2.5 million megabytes.

Huang Chang noted Horizon Robotics doesn't pursue the “computing power on paper”, as it thinks the AI computing power of automotive chips should more depend on the actual performance of AI algorithms running on a chip, namely, MAPS (Mean Accuracy-guaranteed Processing Speed), than peak parameters.

The company revealed the “Journey 2” chips have been introduced to more than 30 vehicle models, such as the Changan UNI-T, the Chery eQ5 and the Changan UNI-K. Besides, the “Journey 3” and the “Journey 5” chips will go into volume production in May 2021 and the third quarter of 2022.

With respect to the shortage of chip production capacity, Horizon Robotics said the impact is not significant.