Intel packages CPUs, FPGAs as GO to target automated driving systems
GO is intended to be a scalable, car-to-cloud system as a step towards a ‘driverless future’ (pictured; development system). Information available at time of writing implies a system configuration that continues to employ discrete Intel CPU chips alongside [former Altera] FPGAs. The latter now include an Arria 10 chip available as a automotive-specification part. Intel says this will be the highest performance processing automotive FPGA, offering one speed grade performance advantage over competing devices. There seems, for present at least, no intention to integrate these elements on a single die.
Specifically, the new automotive-grade Arria 10GX mid-range FPGA for autonomous driving is up to 40% lower power than previous generation FPGAs and features hard floating-point digital signal processing blocks. The Arria 10 automotive-grade FPGA offers more than 320 Gbps of DDR4 bandwidth and more than 200 Gbps of transceiver bandwidth. It also supports 12G serial protocols, 1.5K variable-precision DSP blocks and up to 24 transceivers.
Comprising hardware and software development kits, the full Intel GO system includes:
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Two versions of Intel GO In-Vehicle Development Platforms for Automated Driving, delivering unmatched scalability and power-performance optimization. Scaling from next-gen Intel Atom processors to high-performance Intel Xeon processors plus Arria 10 FPGAs, these two platforms provide the computing resource to perform a range of automated driving functions including perception, fusion and decision-making.
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The Intel GO Automotive 5G Platform offers a 5G-ready platform for the automotive segment allowing car makers to develop and test a wide range of use cases and applications ahead of the expected rollout of 5G in 2020.
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The Intel GO Automotive SDK provides several key tools specific to the automated driving industry – including deep learning tool kits – and promises a consistent development experience to help engineers maximize hardware capabilities while speeding the pace of design.
Intel further comments that, “The importance of 5G to our self-driving future cannot be overstated. Automated vehicles will both generate and take in huge amounts of data in order to navigate and react to sudden changes. Today’s communications systems simply were not designed to handle the massive bandwidth required to support this. That’s where 5G comes in, delivering faster speeds, ultra-low latency and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) connectivity for the era of automated driving.”
Intel has also disclosed, along with automotive supplier Denso, a new stereo vision solution for automakers using the Intel Cyclone V SoC – enabling a new system that helps cars make braking decisions. The technology behind Denso’s offering, which it calls the world’s smallest size form factor stereo camera system, is the Automated Emergency Braking ECU (AEB) for image recognition and processing that assists in automated emergency braking applicable for both pedestrians (up to 50 km/h) and obstacles (up to 80 km/h), brake assist systems and adaptive headlamp systems – all running on Intel’s Cyclone V SoC FPGA. Denso has endorsed Intel‘s FPGA as, “the only suitable silicon solution available to perform such intensive computational processing while also meeting their power and cost requirements.”
The stereo vision system is controlled by the Cyclone V SoC FPGA, which acts as a single-chip programmable high-performance computer to handle the intensive signal processing. Denso says this programmability is key because it lets automakers offer a differentiated solution from their competitors, as well as providing flexibility to vary the board across their own makes and models of cars.
Intel; www.intel.com
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