In addition to Apple Inc, NVIDIA Corp's annual technical conference is also jokingly called the "Spring Festival Gala" by some netizens.

The reason why it is called the "Spring Festival Gala" is that at each conference, NVIDIA Corp will come up with new technological breakthroughs or new products in many fields, such as graphics cards, game encoders and chips.At the GTC graphics card technology conference held this week, NVIDIA Corp also lived up to expectations.

At this year's GTC graphics technology conference, NVIDIA Corp not only unveiled the long-awaited RTX 40 series graphics cards, but also brought graphics architecture software Ada Lovelace, game development tool RTX Remix, industrial cloud service tool Omniverse Cloud service, and neural network development tool Nemo LLM series.

At a time when all audiences were excited about these new products in different fields, NVIDIA Corp dropped another "blockbuster" into the field of self-driving.A new generation of autopilot computing platform called "Thor" has been released.

According to the introduction of NVIDIA CorpThor chip has 2000 TOPS AI computing power alone, which not only surpasses its Atlan chip released last year (which has 1000 TOPS), but also has become the highest computing power level in the industry.

In addition, the Thor chip is not only an autopilot chip, but also has other intelligent related controls of the vehicle, such as the infotainment of the intelligent cockpit.In other words, Thor chip is not only an autopilot domain chip, but also a smart cockpit domain chip.

NVIDIA Corp has always focused on autopilot in the chip field, and Qualcomm Inc is particularly famous for chips in the intelligent cockpit. For example, NIO Inc., XPeng Inc., ideal and extreme krypton and other new energy car companies are Qualcomm Inc 8155 chip "loyal fans."

With the release of Thor chips, it also means that NVIDIA Corp not only issued a battle letter to Mobileye, Horizon and other autopilot chip companies, but also launched a challenge to the intelligent cockpit chip track represented by Qualcomm Inc.Perhaps NVIDIA Corp is so radical because he is stuck in a quagmire.

At the beginning of last month, NVIDIA Corp released his results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, and the data showed that both its revenue and net profit declined. The main reason for this decline is that its main business game business was also in the doldrums in the second quarter of 2023.

In addition to the "internal worries" of the business, NVIDIA Corp also has worries about "external problems" in the field of self-driving chips.Although many car companies have chosen NVIDIA Corp's chip as the computing platform in their products, chip companies such as Mobileye, Horizon and Black Sesame are still eyeing it covetously, NVIDIA Corp is not safe.

Under the "internal and external troubles", the anxious NVIDIA Corp had to radically "sacrifice" the Thor chip, wanting to maintain his advantage in the industry, while taking this opportunity to enter the intelligent cockpit field to look for new growth points.Can NVIDIA Corp realize his "little abacus"?

1

With the Thor chip as the spear, NVIDIA Corp declared war everywhere

How to use one chip to realize the function of eight chips?

NVIDIA Corp gave the answer to this question. At the recent GTC graphics card technology conference, NVIDIA Corp released a chip called Thor (Thor). When NVIDIA Corp CEO Huang Renxun said that the single chip had a computing power of 2000 TOPS, there were bursts of cheers in the venue.

It is normal that there will be such a reaction.Take NVIDIA Corp's latest generation of Orin chips that have been mass-produced on the car as an example. The single chip has a computing power of 254 TOPS. NIO Inc. has achieved a numeric level of 1016 TOPS with the help of four Orin chips, and his ET7 and ET5 have become models with high computing power in the industry.

After the Orin chip, although NVIDIA Corp also launched a new generation of autopilot chip-Atlan chip last year, the computing power of a single chip reached 1000 TOPS, which can be described as the computing power level of four Orin chips.However, with the emergence of Thor chips, the computing power of 8 Orin chips has been directly realized.

As a result, the Atlan chip, which would have been mass-produced in 2025, will most likely be replaced by the Thor chip. After all, Huang Renxun said in a high profile at the press conference."Atlan is no longer number one. It will be replaced by Thor because Thor has more than twice the throughput and delivery performance of Atlan. "

In addition, NVIDIA Corp also added the Transformer (Machine Deep Learning) model to the Thor chip. Based on this model, the vehicle computing platform can achieve larger-scale machine learning, thus improving the recognition and processing ability of the vehicle-machine system to the external environment.

In order to demonstrate the specific strength of the chip, Huang Renxun released a video at the conference site, showing the test vehicle equipped with Thor chip independently completing the operation, perception, decision-making, avoidance and other operations, as well as real-time environmental scanning and data collection and other tasks.

NVIDIA Corp will have such a technological breakthrough, perhaps because it began to lay out in the field of self-driving chips a long time ago.

2014 has been recognized by the industry as the "first year" of the development of the new energy vehicle industry, and a year later NVIDIA Corp launched DRIVE PX, a computing platform for self-driving, which is based on NVIDIA Corp's Maxwell GPU architecture.

According to NVIDIA Corp's introduction at that time, with the help of DRIVE PX vehicles can use deep learning and computer vision to form a perceptual understanding of the environment, thus realizing the basic functions of automatic driving such as automatic cruising and automatic parking.

After that, NVIDIA Corp launched iterative versions of technology on the basis of DRIVE PX, which also attracted the favor of some car companies, including Tesla, Inc..According to Leifeng, every Model S and Model X produced by Tesla since October 2016 is equipped with a Drive PX2 chip.

On GTC Europe in September 2016, NVIDIA Corp released a higher-end Xavier chip than Drive PX2, and the Xavier chip was officially mass-produced in 2020, followed by NVIDIA Corp's launch of the next generation computing platform Drive AGX Orin in 2019.

In terms of computing power, the Orin chip will be seven times that of the Xavier chip, and the overall power consumption of the former will only be twice that of the latter.Because of its excellent performance, Orin soon became the chip chosen by mainstream car companies such as NIO Inc..

Now, with the advent of Thor chips, NVIDIA Corp has also gained a lot of attention and dominant position in the field of autopilot chips.

However, NVIDIA Corp's ambition on the Thor chip did not stop there.

With the development of new energy vehicle industry, the field of intelligent vehicle has also developed rapidly, in which in addition to autopilot, intelligent cockpit has also become a vital industry. Previously, if an intelligent car wants to achieve these two functions, it generally needs the support of two or more computing platforms.

For example, "Wei Xiaoli" three, in order to achieve autopilot function, all adopted Q4 chip from Mobileye in the early stage, and then new models such as NIO Inc. 's ES7, XPeng Inc. G9 and ideal L9 all adopted NVIDIA Corp's Orin chip; in terms of intelligent cockpit, NIO Inc., XPeng Inc. and ideal also used 8155 chip from Qualcomm Inc.

On this point, Huang Renxun also admitted that parking, active safety, driver monitoring, camera mirroring, clustering and infotainment are all controlled by different computing devices. He also said that with the advent of the Thor chip, all these functions will be controlled and realized by this chip in the future.

Thor's multi-computing domain isolation allows concurrent, time-sensitive multi-processes to run without interruption, and you can run Linux, QNX and Android on the same computing platform. "Huang Renxun introduced this.

Huang Renxun means that if the vehicle is equipped with a Thor chip, the chipIt can not only realize the automatic driving function of the vehicle, but also meet the entertainment needs of passengers in the car. It can be said that the goal of "one top eight" has also been achieved at the functional level.

Multi-mode integration of Thor chip, Tu Yuan Nvidia official website

Huang Renxun also said that the Thor chip can not only achieve the function, but also reduce the cost and power consumption of the whole vehicle. After all, compared with the function that would take several chips to be installed on the car before, a Thor chip can be completed.

After the Spring Festival Gala-like press conference, NVIDIA Corp declared war on both the autopilot chip and the intelligent cockpit chip with the Thor chip in the industry.NVIDIA Corp would be so radical, perhaps to break the situation.

2

NVIDIA Corp in the "internal and external troubles"

In the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, NVIDIA Corp handed in an unattractive report card.

According to the financial report, NVIDIA Corp's revenue in the second quarter of 2023 was 45.21 billion yuan, which was 3.03% higher than the same period last year, but it obviously slowed down compared with the double-digit year-on-year growth in the previous quarter. Month-on-month growth even fell to 19.11%It is also its second month-on-month decline since the second quarter of fiscal 2021.

Net profit performed more poorly than revenue.In the second quarter of 2023, Nvidia recorded a net loss of 4.424 billion yuan, down 59.46% from the previous month, and even 72.37% from a year earlier.

It is worth noting that NVIDIA Corp's net profit declined both year-on-year and month-on-month, which began in the last quarter. In the first quarter of 2023, Nvidia recorded a net profit of 10.707 billion yuan, down 15.38% from a year earlier and 46.12% from a month earlier.

Combined with the performance data of the first two quarters of the 2023 fiscal year, we can see that NVIDIA Corp's net profit decline continues to expand at the same time, revenue also began to fall into the predicament of month-on-month decline in the second quarter.

The reason why NVIDIA Corp fell into such a declining performance, perhaps we can see some clues from the performance of its main business.

Since the establishment of NVIDIA Corp, the game GPU and related products business has been its most important business, this business has also continued to maintain quarterly revenue growth.But this positive situation has changed since the second quarter of fiscal 2023.

In the second quarter of fiscal 2023, NVIDIA Corp's game business achieved revenue of 13.8 billion yuan, down 30.3% from the same period in 2022 and 42.5% from 24 billion yuan in the previous quarter.NVIDIA Corp explained the sharp decline in revenue from this business as a result of a decline in sales of game products dominated by personal computers.

NVIDIA Corp Chief Financial Officer Crixus also said on the earnings call that "the global macroeconomic headwind has led to a sudden slowdown in consumer demand for the company's game products." "

In order to change the decline of this business, in order to prop up the overall performance, NVIDIA Corp said that he will work with retailers to adjust the price of game chips.According to online travel, NVIDIA Corp has indeed reduced the price of RTX 30 series graphics cards, which is about $50 lower than the previous price.

In addition to the "internal worries" of the depressed performance of the main business, NVIDIA Corp is not absolutely safe on the autopilot chip track.

As mentioned earlier, due to NVIDIA Corp's early layout in the field of autopilot chips, the first-mover advantage of the industry is more obvious. At present, NVIDIA Corp cooperates with mainstream car companies such as Wei Xiaoli, Weima, Gaohe and Mercedes-Benz, as well as self-driving companies such as Baidu, Inc. Apollo and Wenyuan Zhixing.

Although NVIDIA Corp plans to list Thor chips with a computing power of 2000 TOPS, NVIDIA Corp does not have a leading position in terms of the computing power of the chips that have been mass-produced.At present, the highest computing power chip that NVIDIA Corp has mass produced is the Orin, with a single computing power of 254 TOPS;. By contrast, the single computing power of Huawei's Teng 910 chip has reached 512 TOPS.

In addition to having no advantage in math, NVIDIA Corp is also besieged by other players on the autopilot chip track.

The first competitor is Mobileye, which unveiled three new chip products, the EyeQ Ultra, EyeQ6 Light and EyeQ6 High, at CES in January, covering the L1-L4 autopilot usage scene.

At the same time, Mobileye also announced that it will list in the United States in the form of an initial public offering (IPO) this year. In the industry's view, if it goes public smoothly, it will help it develop better and compete with NVIDIA Corp for the market.

Mobileye continues to increase at the same time, a number of domestic autopilot chip enterprises are also growing rapidly.

Horizon, for example, has more than 20 partner car companies as of August this year, including SAIC, Great Wall and Nawei, while chip products like Huawei have also been carried by brands such as GAC Ean, Naxi Automobile, Polar Fox and Avita.

If Mobileye, Horizon and Huawei are competitors in the same track of NVIDIA Corp, then there are also many players from outside the track who are rapidly entering this track.

Let's take Qualcomm Inc as an example. Since Qualcomm Inc launched the first intelligent cockpit chip Snapdragon 620A in 2014, it has been continuously laid out in the field of smart cockpit chips, thus becoming a leader in the field of smart cockpit chips. But since its first autopilot chip Snapdragon Ride was released in January 2020, it has quickly entered the autopilot chip race track.

Shortly after entering the field of self-driving chips, Qualcomm Inc announced that he had reached a partnership with GM, Great Wall, BMW, Volkswagen and other car companies to install the Ride platform in their next generation of cars. Based on this, there is no doubt that Qualcomm Inc's ambition to challenge NVIDIA Corp is revealed in the industry.

In addition to Qualcomm Inc, auto companies such as Tesla, Inc., Zero run and Geely also followed suit to enter the self-driving chip track.

Tesla, Inc. began the research and development of self-driving FSD chip as early as 2016, and achieved mass production of this chip in 2019; the "Lingxin 01" intelligent driving chip developed by Zero has officially entered mass production with the delivery of Zero C11 in 2021; Geely's core technology's first intelligent driving chip, "Qiying 1", is also expected to be loaded into the car this year.

In addition to these car companies, NIO Inc., Changan, ideal and GM and other car companies have also announced their own plans to develop self-driving chips in the past two years.

From this point of view, NVIDIA Corp is now in the quagmire of "internal and external troubles" of depressed performance and intensified competition in the industry, and the recently high-profile release of the Thor chip may have been seen by NVIDIA Corp as a "rope of hope" to drag himself out of the quagmire.

3

Thor chip, can you drag NVIDIA Corp out of the quagmire?

To discuss this topic, whether the Thor chip has the strength or not is the key.

According to the previous article, the calculation power of a single Thor chip has been as high as 2000 TOPS, it is undeniable that Nvidia has occupied a dominant position in the entire chip industry, and it can also be predicted that when Thor chips are really mass produced, they will certainly attract a lot of car companies to carry this chip, because there is another selling point for publicity in the sales process.

However, it should be noted that in addition to computing power, the dimensions of cost, power consumption, ease of use (or ease of development) and isomorphism (chip compatibility with other systems) are also considered by car companies to determine whether a chip can eventually get on board.

Let's take a look at the cost first. Take the Orin chip that NVIDIA Corp has already mass-produced as an example, the price of each chip has reached 300-500 US dollars (equivalent to about 2100-3500 yuan). In the view of Wang Xianbin of Gaishi Automotive Research Institute, the price of the next generation of Thor chips will be higher.

In addition to the cost, the power consumption of the chip is also a key factor that all new energy car companies pay attention to. After all, the difference in this aspect will greatly affect the mileage performance of a model.In this regard, NVIDIA Corp has been criticized in the industry.

Or take the Orin chip as an example. According to the data released by Tongxi Capital, the power consumption of a single Orin chip is 65W, compared with 10W and 15W for Mobileye EyeQ5 and Horizon Journey 5, respectively.

According to online travel, Texas Instruments Inc's TDA4VM chip can perform high-performance ADAS operations without active cooling at a power consumption of 5-20W and performance efficiency.

When NVIDIA Corp introduced the Thor chip, he did not disclose its individual power consumption, but simply said that it would further reduce the power consumption, but according to Liu Ming, a senior expert in the self-driving chip industry.Because the Thor chip has both autopilot and intelligent cockpit multi-scene computing and analysis capabilities, so the power consumption will be higher than Orin, will not occupy much advantage.

In terms of ease of use, to put it simply, whether car companies can further develop functions based on chips. Among them, Mobileye's "black box" delivery has always been complained by the industry, in other words, its cooperation with car companies has always been more closed and conservative, online travel has been "abandoned" by many car companies, growth has slowed, is Mobileye worth $50 billion? "this has been elaborated in detail in the article.

In contrast, NVIDIA Corp's cooperation with car companies appears to be more open and flexible, such as providing them with a series of self-driving chip development kits to help them achieve personalized solutions.Based on this, NVIDIA Corp's cooperation model with car companies has also been imitated and learned by chip companies such as Horizon, Black Sesame and Huawei.

Finally, let's look at the isomorphism of the chip.

For the intelligent car, the chip belongs to the hardware system. If the chip wants to exert its own calculation and control ability, it needs to cooperate with the internal software system of the vehicle. As mentioned earlier, the Thor chip introduced by NVIDIA Corp belongs to a central domain controller type integrated chip, which integrates the calculation and control of autopilot domain and intelligent cockpit domain.

Although this practice is relatively advanced in the industry, in Wang Xianbin's viewBecause autopilot domain and intelligent cockpit domain belong to two systems, the former has higher requirements for functional security than the latter, so for NVIDIA Corp's Thor chip, how to match with the underlying basic software and operating system integration of vehicle enterprise centralized domain control architecture or central domain + regional domain architecture, and how to balance the technical and functional requirements of autopilot domain and cockpit domain is a great challenge.

The smart cockpit domain will attach more importance to the coupling with the software system than the autopilot domain. Qualcomm Inc has accumulated quite a lot of experience in this respect by virtue of his cooperation with car companies for many years, so when the Thor chip is mass produced in 2025, it is difficult to grab the cake with Qualcomm Inc in the intelligent cockpit chip field. Liu Ming said to the online travel.

In addition to the above factors, although NVIDIA Corp is the first to launch Thor chips across autopilot domain and intelligent cockpit domain, central domain controller chips like this have become the development trend of chips in the future.

According to Guotai Junan Securities forecast, after 2030, the autopilot domain and intelligent cockpit domain master chip will be integrated into the central computing chip, in order to further improve computing efficiency and reduce manufacturing costs through chip integration.

Based on this trend, in the eyes of the industry,In the future, Qualcomm Inc, Horizon and other chip companies will most likely develop to the technology path of central domain controller chips. At that time, NVIDIA Corp may be challenged by many chip companies.

To sum up, although NVIDIA Corp's Thor chip has certain advantages in computing power and flexibility, it has some deficiencies and uncertainties in cost and power control, as well as adapting to autopilot domain and intelligent cockpit domain system, so it is necessary to judge whether the chip can help NVIDIA Corp win industry advantages and obtain new growth points, only after the chip is really mass-produced and loaded.

And before that,For NVIDIA Corp, compared to focusing on whether the Thor chip can occupy an advantage in the industry, perhaps it is more necessary to find a way to contain the decline of their own performance as soon as possible. After all, only by solving the "internal worries" can we maintain our advantage in the chip battlefield in the future.