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Cars are ushered in a comprehensive reform of the combination of software and hardware.

With the advancement of intelligent car development, in recent years, CES Consumer Electronics Show has been completely captured by the automotive industry chain. Just at the end of 2020 in the United States CES, autonomous driving technology is extremely hot. Qualcomm launches new Snapdragon Ride self-driving platform, Intel subsidiary Mobileye shows the latest business progress of its self-driving, Sony’s pure electric concept car Vision-S and said it will provide solutions related to self-driving safety, Ambarella released two models Automotive camera system chip, Livox, an independent subsidiary hatched by DJI, has launched two Lidar products for L3 / L4 autonomous driving … Among them, China, which has been deeply cultivated in the field of automotive AI chips and autonomous driving The startup company, Horizon, once again unveiled the new achievements of intelligent driving, showing the global power of the automotive intelligent chip, a key node of automotive intelligence, to global colleagues.

At this CES show, Horizon exhibited China’s first car-grade AI chip, Journey II. Based on the second generation of the journey, Horizon launched the ADAS solution for the global market. At the same time, the more advanced new generation Matrix autonomous driving computing platform also met the public for the first time in this exhibition. Based on these achievements, Horizon also exhibited a series of established cooperation schemes. Their partners include mainland China, SK Telecom, Freetech, InBev Supercomputing and many other top-tier Tiers1s, OEMs, and other industry chain partners. Some cooperation projects are expected to achieve front-load mass production within 2020. At the exhibition site, Horizon also reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Faurecia, a world leading automobile parts technology company, to jointly develop multi-modal perception Artificial intelligence solutions to promote the commercial application of related technologies in the areas of smart cockpit systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

From technology to solutions, from solutions to mass production projects, Horizon is building a core platform with a “Chinese core” in the trillion-level automotive intelligent networking market, enabling a huge number of traditional industries The door to a new era with infinite possibilities. And the story of all of this, but also from five years ago.

I. Changes in the automotive industry and the beginning of the horizon

In 2015, stimulated by the policy of halving the purchase tax, Chinese cars entered the final stage of carnival before the adjustment period. Behind the gold-plated appearance, the undercurrent of industrial upgrading is surging. Electrification, intelligence, networking, and sharing have come one after another, and cars have ushered in a comprehensive change in the combination of software and hardware.

Among the many companies involved in industry change, Horizon is a unique company. In 2015, Yu Kai, former vice president of Baidu IDL, initiated the establishment of Horizon, focusing on edge AI chip technology. In China, there are few technology-based startups, and even fewer start-ups that have begun to crack the world’s most cutting-edge technology. However, it is precisely the insistence on this “few roads” that allowed Horizon to repeat the tug-and-forth in this big car revolution. From the beginning, it has stepped on the rhythm and started its rapid growth.

In 2016, only one year after the establishment of Horizon, ADAS prototype system was launched; in 2017, China’s first edge artificial intelligence vision chip Journey series and Sunrise series came out; in 2018, Horizon released Matrix autonomous driving computing Platform and won the 2019 CES Innovation Award; in 2019, the journey entered the second generation and evolved into China’s first car-grade AI chip.

Under the blessing of technology and product strength, the commercialization of Horizon is also progressing rapidly. In 2017, Horizon cooperated with Inter. It was recognized by Inter and received A + round financing led by Inter. In 2018, Horizon cooperated with South Korea’s SK. Later, SK led its own investment and started the B round of investment in Horizon. In this round of financing, the top auto group also led the investment. In the automotive field, Horizon is the first start-up company that has established cooperative relationships with the top four Tier1 and OEMs in the world’s four major automotive markets. At present, it has globally empowered Audi, Changan, Ideal, and Shouqi. Numerous Tier1s and OEMs, and have won front-loading fixed-point projects in multiple countries; the autonomous driving computing platform Matrix has enabled nearly 1,000 autonomous vehicles.

In less than five years, the horizon has grown rapidly, and the automotive industry is constantly trial and error, gradually building a logic of change with inherent consistency. An innovative company and a transforming industry are mutually empowering in their respective evolutions, gradually converge, and will be more closely linked.

Second, the inflection point has arrived, and the first year of smart cars is coming

In 2020, the dramatic changes in the automotive industry will take five years. From a slogan, intelligence is becoming reality.

Product level. In 2019, the world’s best-selling new energy vehicles are powered by intelligent networked systemsProvide main value and form a leading trend. Under its leadership, ADAS has become the mainstream configuration of domestic car star models in the past two years.

At the permeability level, multiple agencies have given predictions that the penetration rate of various ADAS products in new cars in the world will exceed the threshold of 50% in 2020.

At the policy level, smart connected cars have been promoting policies. Especially in China, car intelligence has been upgraded to a national strategy alongside new energy vehicles.

Observing the current development trend of the automotive industry, it mainly presents the following two characteristics:

(1) The value of automobiles should be more reflected by intelligence. Especially in the category of new energy vehicles, which have been regarded as the future star, due to the higher cost of batteries and other subsidies, the price is significantly higher than that of traditional fuel vehicles of the same model. The value added to the high price of new energy is intelligence.

(2) On the road of automotive intelligence, the functions of intelligent software and hardware are more and more important, and the importance of automotive technology is relatively weakening. Among the engineers of a global leading new energy automobile company, only 30% are responsible for automotive technology, and intelligent software and hardware personnel are as high as 70%. However, in traditional OEMs, neither the personnel nor the resources in the intelligent field can reach this level. Under the tide of the times, we must quickly change the gene of our products, and seize the opportunity of the industry at the turning point of the intelligent era. Cross-border cooperation and the search for cost-effective suppliers are undoubtedly a top priority.

The low-power, high-performance AI chip that meets the requirements of vehicle regulations is the underlying computing power of intelligent cars. Chinese car-grade chip makers are extremely scarce, and the lack of “cores” has always been a core problem for the automotive industry. From the perspective of industrial development policies, users and manufacturers’ response, China has become one of the global growth poles in the development of automotive intelligence. With the development of automotive intelligence, the rise of the world’s leading automotive AI chip maker must be a high probability event. The environment for the development of the industry calls for a focus on bottom-level innovation such as HorizonNew hard technology companies.

3. Where does the “Horizon” go in the new situation of the industry?

The rapid development of downstream industries has promoted the rapid growth of automotive AI chip companies. But for chip companies like the horizon, the times are far from the stage where they can circle a relatively monopolistic market by relying solely on technical barriers, and then sell their products with peace of mind. In fact, despite rapid progress, automotive intelligence is still in a relatively early stage. If leading chip companies want to have a sustainable advantage, they must not only do a good job in leading their sub-sectors, but also need to make the pattern bigger and make the whole The downstream industry chain is strung together, and through the in-depth understanding of various scenarios of terminal needs, it empowers the entire racetrack. To this end, Horizon is gradually exploring new development models on its own development path.

1. Technology leadership

The AI-car-grade chip for complex environments, the solution of specific scene problems is the core competence. In response to this, Horizon has technically determined a “soft-hard” combination, namely, “algorithm + chip”. At the beginning of the design of Horizon’s chip, it made a pre-judgment based on the future mainstream intelligent scenarios, based on the pre-judgment, designed the algorithm architecture, and targeted the chip’s compiler and instruction level. Then use this as a basis to design the hardware, and fully improve the reliability of the chip in real scenarios. In terms of algorithm, while the core general algorithm achieves the world’s leading level, Horizon also places special emphasis on localized solutions. While meeting the high reliability requirements of ADAS / autonomous driving perception, it also fully considers the driving scenarios in China. Specific, by comprehensively mastering domestic driving scenarios and building a more national data sample database, the current horizon perception algorithm has been able to effectively help ADAS to land autonomous driving in China. Based on these core capabilities, Horizon has formed a clear advantage in technology. The second-generation chip of this journey to CES2020 integrates the second-generation BPU architecture of Horizon, which can provide an equivalent computing power of 4 TOPS and a typical power consumption of 2 watts. It can efficiently and flexibly implement multiple types of AI task processing. In terms of power consumption, computing power, and cost performance, there are obvious advantages.

2. Target Tier 2

Because of its ability to solve problems in specific scenarios, Horizon clearly positions itself as Tier 2 of the autonomous driving industry chain, establishes the strategic positioning of AI on Horizon, and is the lowest enabler in the AI ​​era. Empower Tier 1 and automakers, and actively integrate into the automotive industry chain by providing them with fast and practical solutions. Based on this strategy, Horizon has long established a platform-based cooperation model. Relying on a strong technology base, start cooperation with upstream and downstream industries, such as Inter, SKT, etc., and in the process of cooperation, iterate products and technologies, accumulate service capabilities, and attract more cooperationThe partners joined, and the cooperation with various upstream and downstream companies in the mainland, Faurecia, Changan Automobile, Ideal, and other industries continued to expand in depth and form a virtuous circle. Perceptual algorithms, flexible and efficient customer service capabilities, etc., have seized the high ground of China’s intelligent driving market. These capabilities formed in the process of cooperative development have made Horizon, as a supplier focusing on AI chips, possess the ability to surpass chips and lead the industry. The mass-production launch of the second-generation car-class journey, and the rapid breakthrough of front-loading customers, also made Horizon truly gain the recognition of its “automobile circle” for its technology and business model, which means that the rapid commercialization of Horizon has truly gained Guaranteed foundation.

3. Open empowerment

Different from traditional chip manufacturers, Horizon’s choice is to be fully empowered, to be a technology provider, to achieve customer responsibility, and to maximize the benefits of partners, from providing system reference solutions to fully opening up perceived results. To the full-stack solution of the tool chain, Horizon provides different levels of product delivery and services for different needs of customers. At the same time, the Horizon Open Toolchain provides timely and sufficient services to help customers create products based on high-quality products to achieve product differentiation so as to meet the needs of end consumers in different scenarios during the driving process. At present, the Horizon “Tiangongkaiwu” toolchain has supported mainstream deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe, etc. Developers and researchers can use the toolchain to implement functions, application model training, verification and compilation, optimization And deployment. Data generation model, the model can be deployed on the device to run, and the process can guide the tuning of the model and even collect new data. Such a self-evolving development mode can increase the development speed, lower the development threshold, and ensure the development quality. Based on this model, we can reduce the development manpower by about 30%, save development time by 50%, and more importantly, because the development threshold is reduced, the scale of developers can even be expanded by an order of magnitude. Through open empowerment, Horizon has accelerated the development of the industry, and it has also achieved itself. As a leader in the industry, Horizon ADAS, autonomous driving and multi-mode interactive business are all in the leading echelon, and it is one of the few AI companies in China to achieve large revenue. As a key year for commercialization in 2019, Horizon’s intelligent driving business will have orders of up to several hundred million yuan during the year. As more projects are gradually implemented, it is expected that fixed-point projects will reach double-digits by 2020, and a series of chips in 2022 Annual shipments will reach the million-chip level.

In general, on the road of industry change entering the inflection point and gradually moving deeper, Horizon has chosen a development path that evolves with the industry. Not only promote the core technology, but also build their own moat with a powerful model innovation. In the rise of China’s manufacturing industry, combining the technical advantages and service advantages to create a technology that understands the Chinese market better and develops more flexible and efficient customer service capabilities has been successful many times. At present, Huawei, the world’s leading company, and many companies on the rapid rise of China’s new energy vehicle industry chain, which are among the top in the world, are the beneficiaries of this method. This is a proven road. Today, car-grade chip suppliers that continue to tackle neck technology will also embark on this road to their own broad future.