GoKawiilis transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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What’s in the trunk of your car? Shopping bags? A spare tire? Jumper cables? What about a high-powered computer capable of performing up to one quadrillion operations a second? Only if you’re Waymo.
For the first time, Waymo revealed key details about the heavy compute “brain” housed in the trunk of its robotaxis, including chip architecture, processor specs, and internal component details. The details, published in a blog post today, also includes a list of hardware suppliers that Waymo uses to build the computers that power its driverless fleet.
It’s a revealing look at the world’s leading player in driverless technology. Waymo is currently operating around 4,000 vehicles in over 10 cities, conducting approximately 500,000 paid trips a week. The company claims that its technology significantly reduces traffic crashes and injuries as compared to human drivers. And while a lot of the work to run its vehicles relies on heavy training and simulation that runs in the cloud, a good portion also takes place in the vehicles themselves.
Related Inside the lab where Waymo is building the brains for its driverless cars
Waymo’s robotaxis, festooned with cameras, lidar, and radar, take in massive streams of raw sensor data. That data is processed by artificial intelligence to instantly understand what’s happening around the car, turning that information into safe driving commands in milliseconds. Its computers, which are installed in the trunks of its vehicles, are built to act like its eyes, ears, and brain, to process a full 360-degree view and make split-second decisions without any human backup.
Waymo’s compute needs to run silently while also not taking up too much room in the trunk. Image: Waymo
“Compute systems for autonomous driving handle highly diverse workloads,” Satish Jeyachandran, VP of Engineering, and Daniel Rosenband, Compute Lead, write in the blog post. “At Waymo, we are designing a state-of-the-art system that would be considered impressive for a data center, with the added complexity of an in-vehicle operating domain and real-time requirements.”
Jeyachandran and Rosenband describe three core principles guiding the design of its compute: responsive, ruggedized, and redundant. The stack needs to be able to respond to sensor data as quickly and with as little latency as possible. This requires massive amounts of compute power, which Waymo has scaled 20 times in the past eight years. It also needs to be able to handle all the bumps and cracks in the road, as well as extreme temperatures. And it basically needs to be able to run two systems in parallel, in the event that one fails. These three principles are “non-negotiable,” the executives write.
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