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In the world of smart cars, is Qualcomm the hunter or the prey?

Latest update time：2023-07-16

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Text | Yin Lu

Source | Finance Eleven ‍‍‍‍‍‍

Automobile intelligence is the main driving force for the transformation of the automobile industry. There are more and more sensors such as cameras and radars inside and outside the car. High-performance chips, high-speed storage, and high-speed network connections have become standard features of all new models. More and more large screens and multimedia devices in the cockpit have become commonplace for consumers. Configuration. Whether it is a traditional fuel vehicle or a new energy vehicle, OEMs will not skimp on costs when it comes to intelligent configuration.

Consumers still have some concerns about the electrification of cars, such as mileage, energy replenishment, and safety. However, they are very receptive to automobile intelligence. In addition to paying a certain learning cost and changing some usage habits, automobile intelligence Automobiles will bring almost no obstacles to consumers, and the convenience, comfort and entertainment it brings will give them more value than automobile transportation.

There are four key capabilities that constitute smart cars: 1. High-speed network connection capabilities; 2. Vehicle-to-cloud service capabilities; 3. Smart cockpit; 4. Smart driving.

Among these four capabilities, high-speed network connection is the basic capability necessary for all smart cars, and car-to-cloud service is an essential channel for car companies to push various upgrades, functions and other services to smart car users. These two capabilities are the basis of smart cars. The infrastructure of the car is not perceived by consumers when it is normal. Once a problem occurs, it will directly lead to the loss of almost all functions.

Smart cockpit and smart driving are the external capabilities of smart cars and are also parts that consumers can directly perceive. For most of the development of smart cars, smart driving has been the focus and is also the focus for car companies to demonstrate their capabilities. However, Starting from 2022, the popularity of smart driving will begin to decline, and suppliers and OEMs will regard smart cockpits as the core capability of building smart cars.

After entering 2023, two important new trends have emerged in the development of intelligent cockpits: cabin-driving integration and vehicle - mobile phone interconnection. The former is the integration of smart cockpits and smart driving, focusing on the integration of software and hardware capabilities; the latter is the connection between mobile phones and smart cockpits, focusing on the migration of the ecosystem.

The rise of cabin-driving integration

Cabin-driving integration is one of the hottest terms in the smart car industry after entering 2023. The root cause of the demand for cabin-driving integration is the decline of the autonomous driving craze. After rapid development in the past few years, practitioners and investors have discovered that the technical difficulty of autonomous driving has been underestimated, while consumers’ acceptance of autonomous driving has been underestimated. Overrated.

According to a survey released by S&P Global on June 15, 2023 with a sample size of 7,732 and covering 8 countries, consumers’ expectations for high-level autonomous driving functions are generally lower than 65%, and for various safety-oriented Expectations for the main target assisted driving functions are generally higher than 80%. As early as August 17, 2021, "Financial Eleven" made a similar judgment that assisted driving should be a bodyguard for the driver's safety, rather than a nanny who does everything for him.

China is the market with the fastest development of automobile intelligence, and the popularity of autonomous driving is also declining in 2023. Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, said at the investor communication meeting at the end of March, "Autonomous driving is all nonsense, all deception, and ultimately it is a "Advanced Assisted Driving" has triggered heated discussions, and companies such as Xiaopeng and Huawei that have invested heavily in autonomous driving have expressed different opinions. But recently, Huawei's attitude has also relaxed. On July 2, at the Wenjie M5 User Experience Day, Wang Yanmin, President of Huawei Terminal BG's Smart Car Selection Business Department, said, "Many consumers don't particularly care about smart driving functions."

Consumers’ lack of interest and confidence in smart driving functions is mainly due to two reasons, according to many practitioners:

First, with the gradual popularization of smart functions, the target consumers have shifted from pioneer consumers in the past to mainstream consumers, and mainstream consumers will be particularly cautious and conservative about safety-related functions such as smart driving.
Second, as the number of vehicles equipped with smart driving increases, accidents also increase. Whether these accidents are related to the smart driving system or not, they will strengthen the impression that smart driving is not perfect and safe enough in subsequent dissemination, because in ordinary people, In the eyes of consumers, "the more functions, the faster it breaks down" is a reasonable judgment both logically and based on past experience.

While consumer confidence is low, smart driving has increasingly higher requirements for hardware performance and R&D investment. A reality recognized by the industry is that realizing basic functions of intelligent driving, such as automatic parking, adaptive cruise, lane keeping, conditional automatic emergency braking, etc., does not require strong hardware performance. However, if you want to achieve a high level of intelligent driving, such as point-to-point map navigation on highways or urban areas, you need strong hardware performance and the cost will be very high.

When the popularity of smart driving was high in the past two years, car companies had no choice but to pile up hardware at any cost in order not to fall behind their competitors in their new products. But for consumers, when these products are delivered, most of the software functions have not yet been developed, and the costly hardware is just a decoration, and the performance is redundant. If consumers have high expectations for smart driving, these redundant capabilities may be reserved for future upgrades. However, consumers’ interest is limited at this stage. Will these hardware capabilities still be used in the future?

It is against this background that the integration of cabin and driving was brought to the forefront. When loading a car, sufficient redundancy must still be considered for hardware performance, because cars are different from consumer electronics products and have a long service life. If performance redundancy is not considered when loading a car, the hardware will become a serious restriction in the middle and late stages of the product's life. However, in the design of integrated cabin and driving, redundant hardware performance can be freely selected to support intelligent driving or intelligent cockpit.

Therefore, the key to realizing the integration of cabin and driving is to use one chip or one controller to support both the needs of smart cockpit and smart driving. At present, many key suppliers of automotive chips have proposed their own solutions.

The first person to propose an integrated cabin-driving solution was the Thor chip released by Nvidia in 2022. Its computing power of up to 2000 Tops can support both smart driving and smart cockpits. However, the chip will not be mass-produced until 2025, and it will not be available for use since its release in September 2022. There was no news update until May 2023, when Nvidia and MediaTek announced that they would jointly develop a 3nm automotive SoC, scheduled to be launched in 2024. Will the original Thor be the same as its predecessor Atlan in the current market environment? It is still unknown whether it has been cancelled.

Currently, it is Qualcomm’s solution that has truly entered the application stage in cabin-driving integration. At the Qualcomm Automotive Technology and Cooperation Summit held for the first time in China at the end of May 2023, "Financial Eleven" saw integrated cabin and driving solutions developed by multiple suppliers based on Qualcomm's existing and upcoming chips.

For example, the controller developed by Bosch based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip simultaneously realizes smart cockpit and automatic parking functions. Baidu uses a controller composed of two Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 chips to simultaneously implement smart cockpit and smart driving backup processor functions. These are extended developments by suppliers and OEMs based on Qualcomm's smart cockpit chips, and are not native integrated cabin-driving solutions.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC, which was upgraded based on the Snapdragon Ride SoC released last year, is Qualcomm's first native cabin-driving all-in-one chip solution. Compared with Nvidia Thor's high-performance single-chip solution, Qualcomm uses a multi-chip solution with computing power covering The range ranges from 36TOPS to 2000TOPS, and the supported sensors range from a minimum of 3 radars + 1 camera to a maximum of 10 radars + 15 cameras + 4 lidars. The achievable intelligent driving functions range from the most basic safety assistance to completely autonomous driving.

Such a large coverage allows Qualcomm’s smart driving solutions to cover almost all competitors on the market, from DJI with the lowest cost to Nvidia with the highest performance, all are within Qualcomm’s goals.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC system solution. Image source: Qualcomm

The biggest feature of this solution is that it can be expanded, upgraded, and development results can be seamlessly migrated. Nakul Duggal, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm's automotive business, told Finance Eleven that scalability and upgradeability are the most important features of Qualcomm's solution. Since all functions are developed based on the same architecture and platform, it is very convenient to upgrade the hardware when user needs are upgraded, and user development results can be seamlessly migrated to higher-performance hardware platforms.

If a car is compared to a computer, Qualcomm's solution means that the CPU, memory, and graphics card can be upgraded at any time. All software in the computer does not need to be modified. After upgrading the hardware, the performance will be improved and the experience will be upgraded.

Expandability and upgradeability are increasingly important in the current market environment. Because consumers' demand for smart cockpits is certain, both suppliers and OEMs have rigid performance requirements for smart cockpit chips. However, the demand for smart driving is very elastic. Although consumer interest is not high at this stage, as the functions become more mature, demand may explode in the future.

Qualcomm's integrated cabin-driving solution provides flexibility for smart driving while ensuring smart cockpit performance. At the same time, Qualcomm ranks first in the two fields of vehicle high-speed network connection and smart cockpit. This makes Qualcomm a reliable option when OEMs choose integrated cabin and driving solutions, especially when the current requirements for smart driving are not high. For OEMs that have high requirements for smart cockpits, Qualcomm is the most reliable option.

This is undoubtedly bad news for other companies that specialize in intelligent driving development. In the world of integrated cabin and driving, these intelligent driving developers are all prey in Qualcomm's eyes.

The resurgence of rider connectivity

In the world of cabin-driving integration, Qualcomm has an advantage because it leads the way in smart cockpits. However, in the smart cockpit market, Qualcomm is by no means able to sit back and relax, because vehicle - mobile phone interconnection is very likely to become a disruptive factor for smart cockpits.

Driver interconnection is actually the original form of smart cockpits. Apple's Carplay, Google's Android Auto, Baidu's Carlife, and the mobile phone screen projection solutions adopted by some car companies are all driver interconnection modes. However, due to the technical conditions at the time, among these driver interconnection solutions, except for Apple’s Carplay, the other results were not ideal.

As for Apple's Carplay, due to its strict development technical specifications, the user experience is very good. For a long time, when consumers evaluate whether a car's smart cockpit is excellent, Apple Carplay has occupied a high weight. It wasn’t until Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chips began to be installed on a large scale in cars and the application ecology of smart cockpits was greatly enriched that the driver’s interconnection method represented by Carplay gradually cooled down. “Cars replace mobile phones” became the focus of many automakers when developing smart cockpits. important goals.

In 2022, the release of the next generation of Carplay will bring driver interconnection back to people's attention. Since car companies have opened up more functional interfaces to Apple and higher bandwidth and connection speeds, the next generation of Carplay can achieve more functions and provide Richer display effects make the car’s smart use experience infinitely closer to Apple level. Upgrading your mobile phone at the same time can simultaneously upgrade the performance of Carplay, because Carplay's information processing is completed by the car chip and the mobile phone chip at the same time.

However, the system will not be officially installed in cars until the fourth quarter of 2023. It is not yet clear whether its performance can be as amazing as what was shown at the press conference. However, using the existing Carplay as a reference, it is certain that this system The aesthetic performance of the system is definitely pleasing to the eyes of consumers.

In terms of driver Internet, Apple offers futures, and Huawei delivers spot goods. The car-machine system developed based on Hongmeng has been called the "vehicle-machine ceiling" by consumers since its inception. In terms of fluency, functionality, and integration with mobile phones, In terms of interconnection, Huawei's smart cockpits are the first echelon in the current market, and the premise for achieving this effect is that whether Huawei's cars or mobile phones, their hardware performance is not the strongest.

The latest domestic driver interconnection case is the Flyme Auto smart cockpit system jointly developed by Lynk & Co and Meizu. In June 2023, the system had its first real-machine experience, and the functional evaluation of this system has been externally demonstrated. The performance of this system No less than Huawei’s Driver Internet.

In addition, NIO mobile phones will also be launched in the third quarter of 2023. NIO founder Li Bin said at the Qualcomm Auto Summit that NIO will create the best solution for driver interconnection.

The key reason why driver interconnection is gaining popularity again is that smart cockpits have very low capacity for application software. The safety requirements of smart cockpits are much higher than those of mobile phones. The stability and reliability of the entire car-machine system is the first priority. Therefore, the system is relatively closed and the inability to freely install various software is a common feature of almost all smart cockpit systems. After all, no one wants to install it. After using certain software, the car will start to freeze, freeze or even restart.

However, the entertainment needs of smart cockpits are urgent. Although all smart cockpit developers will pre-install mainstream entertainment application software, after all, entertainment needs are highly personalized, and it is difficult for several mainstream applications to meet the needs of most users. At this time, Migrating mobile phone applications to the car has become a natural choice for many car companies. This is also the current mainstream driver interconnection model. That is, most applications on the mobile phone can be run in a closed sandbox on the car side without affecting the car side. It is stable and safe, and provides the same rich application ecosystem as mobile phones.

In fact, most of the current driver interconnection is still based on the hardware foundation provided by Qualcomm, such as in-car wireless high-speed connections. Currently, almost all Qualcomm solutions are used. But whether it is an automobile manufacturer or a mobile phone manufacturer, they are trying to have more autonomy in the development of driver interconnection.

For example, the solutions of Lynk & Co and Meizu use the cockpit controller developed by Ekatong based on the chip of Xinchi Technology on the car side. The core of Apple Carplay is the A series chip in the mobile phone. The core of Huawei driver interconnection is the Hongmeng system. In these driver interconnection solutions, Qualcomm is a simple equipment supplier, and its presence in the entire smart cockpit system is very weak.

As the subsystem in smart cars that interacts most frequently with users, the smart cockpit is the most important part for car companies. Especially luxury brands, which mostly face high-value users. It is even more critical to understand user preferences and optimize user services. Therefore, most of the automakers that prefer driver connectivity are luxury brands. Among the first 14 brands to support Apple's next-generation Carplay, 10 are luxury brands. Lynk & Co is a high-end brand owned by Geely, and Nio also focuses on luxury.

For luxury car companies, cost is not the most sensitive, user experience is. Solutions that can be flexibly expanded are not very attractive to these car companies. One-step high-performance solutions are their first choice. Therefore, in the smart cockpit market of high-end luxury cars, Qualcomm is only one of the options and has no obvious advantages. For example, currently most of Audi's cockpit chips are provided by Samsung, most of BMW's cockpit chips are provided by Intel, and most of Mercedes-Benz's cockpit chips come from Nvidia.

In the development of driver Internet, every car company, mobile phone company and chip company are eyeing Qualcomm's share of smart cockpits. Imagine if Apple's Vision Pro could support Carplay. Would this smart cockpit experience be worth looking forward to?

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This article is reprinted from Finance Eleven. The content is for communication and learning purposes only. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@gsi24.com.