On the Dash:
- Waymo’s new 5nm ASIC computer chip delivers 1,000+ trillions of operations per second (TOPS) for sensor processing.
- The company says Computing power has scaled 20 times over the past eight years.
- Waymo still partners with AMD, Nvidia, TSMC and others on hardware.
Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, built its own computer chip to help its robotaxis react faster on the road, the company said Thursday.
The chip is called an ASIC, short for application-specific integrated circuit. It handles the flood of data coming in from a robotaxi’s cameras, radar and lidar sensors, and processes that data before passing it to Waymo’s driving software. Waymo said the goal is faster, sharper reactions in busy city traffic.
Waymo said the ASIC alone delivers more than 1,000 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, dedicated to front-end sensor processing and machine learning models. The company said it has scaled its overall compute power 20 times over the past eight years, drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles to guide the design.
Waymo built the system around three priorities. It needs to be responsive enough to translate sensor input into a driving decision within milliseconds. It needs to be ruggedized to withstand vibration, shock and extreme temperatures, aided by a direct tie into the vehicle’s liquid cooling system. And it needs to be redundant, running as two independent engines in parallel so one can take over instantly if the other fails.
The custom ASIC doesn’t replace Waymo’s outside suppliers. The company said it continues to work with AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext and TSMC to build out the rest of its computing stack, pairing its own silicon with third-party CPUs, GPUs and accelerators.
Waymo said its latest system processes 13 high-resolution cameras simultaneously in real time, an increase the company credits to co-designing its chips, sensors and algorithms together rather than sourcing them separately.
Waymo plans to share more detail on its compute strategy at the Hot Chips conference next week at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium in Palo Alto, California. Hot Chips is an annual conference where chip makers reveal the technical details of their newest processors, usually months before those chips actually ship.
