We kick off our coverage of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) with AMD’s announcement aimed at adding more compute performance for automotive processing. CES 2024 runs this week from January 9 – 12 in Las Vegas.
At the show, AMD has announced two new chips built to power next generation vehicles. These chips fill key roles in automotive architectures and pave the way for new and improved features.
Each of AMD’s two new chips, the Versal AI Edge XA and V2000A, provide new processing power and features to automotive designers looking to leverage the latest technology.
As AI/ML becomes more prolific in every industry, many designers are looking to dedicated AI accelerators and next generation processors to provide the needed performance. As such, the two new chips from AMD have the potential to give automotive designers a major boost in resources for a variety of applications.
To learn more about the two new chips, we sat down with AMD’s Senior Automotive Marketing Director, Wayne Lyons, Senior Automotive Product and Marketing Manager, Rehan Tahir, and Senior Director of Embedded Product Marketing, Amey Deosthali to discuss how the latest AMD devices could shake up the automotive industry.
Automotive AI SoCs
First up, AMD has introduced the Versal AI Edge XA line of adaptive SoCs, purpose built to provide a boost to automotive signal processing and sensor fusion that only AI can provide. Within the Versal AI Edge XA series, dedicated AI engines provide optimization potential for many applications including forward cameras or in-cabin driver monitoring in a single auto-qualified device.
The AI engines within the adaptive SoCs are capable of handling many different AI models including classification or feature tracking. The portfolio includes options ranging from 20k to 521k look-up tables, and AI performance from 5 TOPS to 171 TOPS. Furthermore, the scalability within the adaptive SoCs allow designers to port designs to hardware with an appropriate amount of processing power. More information is available in the Versal AI Edge XA data sheet.
The Versal AI Edge XA adaptive SoC provides designers with AI-accelerated support to accomplish feature tracking or object recognition, or improved signal processing or sensor fusion leveraging the onboard AI engine.
While not every automotive feature benefits from AI, many emerging technologies could make use of AI-enabled processing to improve performance. “When we talk about AI, AI is critical for these automotive applications everywhere, from forward camera, driver monitoring, or surround view,” says Rehan Tahir. “AI and automotive are becoming kind of intertwined.”
Next-Gen Processing Power for Automobiles
In conjunction with AI acceleration, AMD also announced that its latest embedded processor, the Ryzen Embedded V2000A, has passed qualification and is entering mass production. While AI performance and hardware acceleration is certainly a benefit for many applications, the V2000A processor compliments the application-specific nature of the Versal AI series by providing a high-performance processor to enable new automotive features.
The V2000A provides new processing power to support more innovation in-cabin, including infotainment, driver assistance, and data visualization.
This new processing power comes at a welcome time as more manufacturers move away from distributed processing. “We see OEMs pretty aggressively moving towards centralized architectures and having a move towards reducing the ECUs,” says Amey Deosthali. “What that is doing is driving new chip architecture.”
Containing CPU and GPU in one, the V2000A makes use of AMD’s Zen2 cores and 7 nm process technology to bring a “PC-like” experience to automobiles. Applications such as infotainment, digital cockpit, and high-level sensing are expected to benefit from the new embedded processing power and digital graphics rendering.
Synergistic Innovation
This week at CES, AMD is showing both new devices, as well as demonstrating how they can work together in a system. Wayne Lyons described the unified AMD ecosystem and CES demo.
“This in-vehicle experience demonstration, I think will be a good way to see the impact of the combination of our ADAS technology for surround view, visualization, and driver monitoring, combined with the in-cabin experience that can be delivered by the V2000.”
Both the Versal AI Edge XA and V2000A series build on each other to form a broader AMD automotive ecosystem. While the AI Edge can perform specific functions such as feature tracking or driver monitoring, the V2000A can update in-cabin displays simultaneously and process sensor data to perform driver assistance. As a result, the number of features in next-generation vehicles could see a big boost thanks to the AMD devices.
You can visit AMD at its CES “AMD Connect” exhibition located in the Venetian Expo – Titian 2302-2305.
All images used courtesy of AMD
