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Waymo gets a lot of attention for its fast-paced expansion. And for good reason; it seems like every week, the company’s robotaxis are arriving in a new city, or expanding within an existing service area.
We’ve known for a while that Waymo’s sixth-generation self-driving system — which debuted in its next-generation Ojai robotaxi — is central to those ambitions. But now we have a better understanding about why.
The company, which just opened its Ojai robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, has repeatedly said that this next-gen vehicle is cheaper to build, operate, and maintain — ingredients required if the company has any hopes of someday turning a profit.
What was less clear, until this week, was just how hands-on and vertically integrated Waymo has become as it chases that goal.
The company shared this week that it built a custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip, which is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core “brain” of the self-driving system. (To get a sense of how much data, consider that the Waymo Ojai has 13 high-fidelity cameras.) Waymo said the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of computing performance, a statistic that puts it roughly in the same performance range as Nvidia’s latest DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor, a powerful computer designed for automated driving applications.
The end result, Waymo says, is a system that has “unmatched efficiency and performance.” The upshot: Waymo contends that this chip is a critical piece of a system that can react fast and safely in complex, high-density environments — like cities.
It’s worth noting that Waymo isn’t working alone on compute. The company listed a slew of partners, some for the first time, that includes AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC.
A little bird
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
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