Chinese automaker Nio develops 5nm chip, claims a 4x advantage over Nvidia's Drive Orin X processors

Nio
(Image credit: Nio)

Nio, a major maker of electric vehicles from China, has developed its first 5nm processor for autonomous driving. The chip comes packing 50 billion transistors, comparable to Nvidia's A100 processor for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The company believes that its system-on-chip is more advanced than Nvidia's Drive Orin X, which it currently uses for its self-driving systems. Interestingly, the SoC is set to be made using a 5nm-class process technology, reports CnEVPost.

Nio's Shenji NX9031 SoC was developed by the company itself and packs 32 general-purpose Arm cores in total (including both Big and Little cores), a neural processing unit, a graphics processor, and an LPDDR5X memory subsystem. The system-on-chip can process data from LiDAR, which differs from processors used by Tesla that rely on data from video sensors. Since the unit is designed for autonomous driving applications, it complies with the ASIL-D risk and safety requirements. 

TOPICS
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.