Childhood sweethearts, ideal journey: mass production of large computing power chip samples

Until the last moment before taking the stage to give a speech, Yu Yinan was still watching assisted driving videos about the Ideal L8 Pro on his mobile phone.

More than a month ago, on February 17, the Ideal L8 Pro, known as the “first domestic mass-produced model with large  computing power chips ,” ushered in a major OTA —the standard Ideal AD Pro high-speed NOA function was officially launched.

This means that the Lili L8 Pro car has intelligent driving capabilities such as autonomous overtaking, entry and exit of ramps, and flexible lane changes. Relevant car owners were very excited after receiving the OTA news. They tried it immediately, shared the experience process on the Internet, and praised it as "very easy to use."

Also excited is Horizon 5, the supplier of Journey 5. Starting from the beginning of April 2022, together with Li Auto, we will promote Journey 5 to achieve world premiere mass production on Li Auto L8 Pro. The SOP will be completed as scheduled in November, and then officially launched. Delivered, and eventually became the only player in the world to mass-produce 100 TOPS computing power chips.

According to the latest data released by Horizon, the shipment volume of Journey 5 chips has exceeded 100,000 pieces, which also reflects the popularity of the ideal AD Pro model.

As Horizon Vice President and President of the Software Platform Product Line, Yu Yinan is the general person in charge of the Ideal AD Pro cooperation project and has personally experienced the entire mass production process of Journey 5.

He is naturally very concerned about the latest developments of the Ideal L8 Pro.

When the expressway NOA was just pushed out, Yu Yinan immediately put down the work at hand and drove the car for several hours on the Fifth Ring Expressway near the Horizon office.

"As soon as he returned to the company, he smiled and shouted that we should all try it. It was really fun," an employee recalled. Yu Yinan gestured with his hands in the office and excitedly greeted almost everyone he met. A person, "crazy" starts the recommendation.

Yu Yinan shared at the Horizon "Journey 5 First High-Speed ​​NOA" media communication meeting

Until a month later, on March 17, when Horizon held a media communication meeting for the "Journey 5 First High-Speed ​​NOA", Yu Yinan's excitement had not dissipated.

Since the launch of the feature, he has been paying attention to the online evaluation of the L8 Pro assisted driving by ideal car owners. So when the opening host finished his speech and walked over to hand over the microphone, he was stunned for a moment, and then came back to consciousness. When it was time for me to take the stage, I stood up and said with a smile, "Okay, okay", put down the phone and took the microphone.

Also present at the communication meeting was Zhao Zhelun, director of intelligent driving products of Li Auto, who was responsible for docking the Li Auto AD Pro mass production project with Horizon.

Zhao Zhelun sat in the audience, listening to Yu Yinan recalling the process of close collaboration between the two teams, and applauded repeatedly. When it was his turn to speak, the first sentence he spoke was: "Thank you Horizon, for the ideal AD Pro project, Horizon It helped us a lot.”

"Based on Horizon and Journey 5 chips, Ideal can create a high-speed NOA with top-level experience." Zhao Zhelun said.

Ideal to roll high-speed NOA into a "Red Sea"

How useful is the high-speed NOA on the Lili L8 Pro?

At this event, I spent an hour experiencing the Lili L8 AD Pro. My biggest feeling is that this system is very close to the level of a human driver. Whether it is starting and stopping with a car, overtaking, changing lanes, entering and exiting ramps, or avoiding obstacles, it can respond quickly and brake smoothly, ensuring both safety and driving experience.

Two years ago, Ideal's high-speed NOA was "late to come." But this time, with the high-speed NOA of Ideal AD Pro being put into mass production, Ideal is very likely to directly roll the market into a "Red Ocean."

The background that needs to be mentioned is that more and more users are incorporating intelligent driving functions into their car purchase decisions, and the high-speed NOA market is ushering in a battle.

Previously, pioneering forces such as Tesla and Wei Xiaoli were entrenched in it, improving their capabilities through continuous OTA.

Later, Baidu, Momenta, Haomo Zhixing, Qingzhou Zhihang and other forces swarmed in to provide NOA solutions to various car companies, further intensifying the competition. The latest news is that SAIC Zhiji will launch high-speed NOA in the first quarter of this year.

It can be seen that high-speed NOA has become a "must compete" for car players.

The scary thing about the ideal is that on the high-speed NOA, "standard configuration is the top configuration", that is, a leapfrog intelligent driving experience is created under the same level configuration.

Someone did a horizontal evaluation test on different brands of NOA and found that the ideal L8 Pro was far ahead in multiple indicators and comprehensive scores.

Some people also conducted NOA comparison tests between the Lili L8 Max equipped with NVIDIA Orin X and the Lili L8 Pro, and the results showed that there was almost no difference in actual experience...

What exactly makes such a high-speed NOA experience?

Zhao Zhelun’s sharing at the scene revealed a mysterious corner of the Ideal L8 Pro for us.

First of all, we can get a glimpse of the sensing hardware. On the basis of the 2021 Lideal ONE equipped with an 8-megapixel front-view camera , the Ideal L8 Pro has added five 2-megapixel peripheral cameras, thus greatly enhancing the lateral detection. and the perception of ramps and large curves, laying a good foundation for subsequent planning and control;

Secondly, Ideal AD Pro uses a more powerful algorithm - based on the new BEV algorithm framework, the network depth reaches 30,000 layers and the network parameters reach 2.8 billion, which greatly improves the overall perception ability of NOA;

Finally, and the most important thing that cannot be ignored is that the Lideal AD Pro is equipped with a powerful chip - Journey 5. It is it that supports the rich sensors and powerful algorithms of the Lideal L8 Pro.

Journey 5 is Horizon's third-generation car-grade product for high-level autonomous driving. The computing power of a single chip is as high as 128 TOPS. On the sensor, it supports the perception calculation of up to 16 cameras, and also supports millimeter-wave radar and laser . Fusion perception of multiple types of sensors such as radar .

In terms of support for algorithm models, Journey 5 can efficiently perform large-scale neural network calculations, widely supports various top models and operators, natively supports the Transformer model required for BEV perception, and can easily cope with the deployment of various BEV perception algorithms.

In other words, although the ideal full-stack self-developed BEV algorithm is complex and large enough, it is still within the "range" of the Journey 5 chip.

This chip is equipped with rich heterogeneous computing resources, such as dual ISP, CV engine, dual vision  DSP  and other configurations, which are enough to meet the computing power needs of the ideal algorithm team now and even in the future.

The above alone is not enough to explain why the Ideal L8 Pro can surpass competing products and equal the Ideal L8 Max in terms of high-speed NOA experience.

The real answer lies in the ideal L8 Pro’s smart driving product positioning this time: standard or top-of-the-line configuration.

If you carefully study the chip configurations of high-level NOA players, you will find that the computing power of the Journey 5 is not the highest. The Orin He competed in Taiwan and even fought for the first place.

Compared with Orin

From the data, we can see that the real computing performance of Horizon Journey 5 has reached 1531FPS (image rate 1531 frames/second). Under the typical classification model, the computing performance of Journey 5 is comparable to Orin X, but when processing single frame input When it comes to large megapixel images, it reaches 3.3 times that of Orin X.

Such powerful performance not only brings ideal leapfrog performance, but also greatly optimizes costs. Journey 5 is only half the chip area of ​​Orin X, which means it can achieve the same high computing performance at half the cost of the latter.

This is also the reason why Li Auto has made high-speed NOA “standard”.

A collaboration that set a record for the fastest delivery

To ensure an intelligent driving experience, powerful chip performance is only a prerequisite.

For car companies responsible for realizing this "experience", whether the chip is "easy to use" is a top priority.

According to Zhang Lijun, General Manager of Horizon North Area Business, for high-speed NOA functions to be put into cars, car companies need chip suppliers to provide tool chains for migration algorithms, underlying system software to support chip operation, and middleware to connect the application layer and underlying software . The ease of use of components directly affects the development efficiency of intelligent driving systems.

The Horizon team has algorithm genes since its establishment. With Journey 5 as the core, Horizon has created an open and easy-to-use intelligent computing open platform, including chip development kits, domain control reference designs, chip tool chains and software development platforms, etc. Provide full-process support for level autonomous driving development and deployment.

Pulling the time back to early April 2022, after many in-depth communications with Horizon, Ideal officially decided to use the Journey 5 chip to build Ideal AD Pro.

According to the plan, Lideal AD Pro is positioned to provide an intelligent driving system for the Pro version and Air version of the Lideal L series. Its functions mainly include high-speed NOA and autonomous parking.