This article was compiled from AsiaTimes by Semiconductor Industry Perspectives (ID: icviews).NIO announced the launch of its own processor, and Xiaomi launched its first electric car. 
Chinese electric car maker NIO and smartphone maker Xiaomi released new products at the end of the year that challenged NVIDIA and Apple. This marks another step forward in China's efforts to develop its own semiconductor technology and eliminate its dependence on imports. On December 23, NIO released its first self-driving chip, which is said to be superior to the currently used NVIDIA Drive Orin chip. The Shenji NX9031 SoC will be used in the company's **ET9 executive sedan, which was also unveiled at NIO Day 2023. The ET9 is a long-wheelbase four-door luxury electric car that costs around 800,000 yuan, or $113,000 at the current exchange rate. ET9 can be ordered in China now, but deliveries are not expected to begin until the first quarter of 2025. China's first 5nm-process automotive chip, NX9031, could be manufactured by TSMC, Samsung Electronics, or Intel foundry services. The NX9031 is equipped with an ARM 32-core CPU, NPU (Neural Processing Unit), graphics cores, and more than 50 billion transistors. It comes with low-power, double-data-rate LPDDR5X memory (probably made in Korea) that can process LiDAR data. The NPU mimics the human brain and derives the best solution from the available data. Lidar uses lasers to measure the environment, providing autonomous vehicles with 3D images of roads and traffic. The NX9031 will work with NIO's vehicle operating system, SkyOS, which covers vehicle control, driver assistance, cockpit systems, and mobility connectivity. According to NIO CEO Li Bin, the NX9031 has the computing power equivalent to four NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs, which are the standard configuration currently used in NIO's electric vehicles. Each of these 7nm chips has a computing speed of up to 254 tops (trillion operations per second), for a total of 1016 tops. That's enough for today's smart driving, but not enough for the next generation of autonomous vehicles. NVIDIA came to the same conclusion. The Drive Thor, the successor to the Drive Orin, is scheduled to go into production in 2025. It will have twice the computing power of the Drive Orin. What does this mean?"If we look at today's cars, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument clusters, and infotainment systems are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle," explains Danny Shapiro, vice president at NVIDIA. By 2025, these features will no longer be separate computers. Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to effectively consolidate these capabilities into a single system, reducing overall system costs. "NIO established an IC design team in 2020 with the aim of developing independent intelligent driving capabilities, including sensors, autonomous driving algorithms, and now SoCs. 
Xiaomi beat Apple to advance
On December 28, Xiaomi unveiled its first electric car to thousands of people at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. At the press conference, CEO Lei Jun said that the company's goal is to produce a dream car that can be comparable to Porsche and Tesla. The Xiaomi SU7 (SU stands for Speed Ultra) is a four-door electric sedan designed by professionals who have worked at BMW and Mercedes-Benz and manufactured by BAIC Group. It is equipped with the NVIDIA Drive Orin SoC for assisted and autonomous driving, as well as Xiaomi's own operating system. **Show su7 to avoid obstacles and stop on the street without a driver. The SU7 is available in two- and four-wheel drive versions and is expected to be delivered in the first quarter of 2024, ** yet to be announced, but based on the Tesla Model S and Porsche Taycan Turbo, it could cost up to CNY 700.9 million, roughly the same as the NIO ET9. Xiaomi plans to invest about $10 billion in its automotive business over the next 10 years. "Through the efforts of the next 15 20 years", Lei Jun said, "we will become one of the top five automakers in the world, and the plan to strive to upgrade the entire *** Xiaomi in China seems to put Apple to shame." Last September, Macrumours reported that a semi-autonomous Apple Car with a neural processor could still be launched in 2026, but since the project was launched in 2014, there have been multiple delays and little information from management. Apple CEO Tim Cook said: "We are focused on autonomous systems. This is a core technology that we believe is very important. We see it as the mother of all AI projects. This is probably one of the most difficult AI projects to execute. But he said that in 2017. In any case, Xiaomi has beaten Apple, and Huawei has also announced its entry into the electric vehicle market in 2021. According to sources, Huawei plans to build hundreds of new electric vehicle sales and service outlets in China in the next two years. Huawei has developed its own automotive IC and operating system. Its data center processors are capable of computing power of 352 tops, enabling L3 driving automation. This means operating completely autonomously under certain conditions, such as a designated route, highway driving, or parking. At the same time, NVIDIA continues to supply more than a dozen Chinese automakers, including NIO, Xiaomi, BYD, Denza, Xpeng and Zeekr (a Geely company). Zeekr is the first Chinese automaker to announce the adoption of Drive Thor. Xpeng has reportedly asked NVIDIA to provide it with a custom-designed version of Drive Thor. At the end of November, it was reported that Nvidia was hiring more than 20 experts for its self-driving development team in China, which is led by Wu Xinzhou, who joined NVIDIA in August last year. Previously, he served as Vice President of Autonomous Driving at Xpeng Motors. Nvidia is likely to maintain a strong position in China's autonomous driving market, unless the U.S. Department of Commerce deems Drive Thor too good for China. If this happens, Chinese companies should be able to make up for it. *Disclaimer: This article was created by the original author. The content of the article is its personal point of view, we only share and discuss, does not mean that we agree or agree, if you have any objections, please contact the background.