Intel Joining Delphi, Mobileye Self-Driving Car Partnership
The collaboration between British automotive parts maker Delphi Automotive and Israeli computer vision system company Mobileye, announced Aug. 23, to develop high-end self-driving solutions is taking another step forward. Technology giant Intel Corp. will join the venture, the companies are expected to announce Tuesday.
Mobileye is a known name in the autonomous driving space, having famously partnered with — and split from — industry leader Tesla Motors. The split, which became unusually public, came close on the heels of the Israeli firm announcing another collaboration with German automaker BMW, which also included Intel.
When it comes to the field of autonomous driving, which is akin to computers on wheel that drive themselves from point to point, Intel is not in the same leading position it enjoys in the world of personal computers. That could be a reason why the company is entering multiple ventures in the upcoming industry.
By 2019, this new venture hopes to provide a system that can be used in inexpensive vehicles which will use a package of chips capable of performing about 20 trillion mathematical computations every second, Delphi’s vice president of engineering and services Glen DeVos told the New York Times in an interview Monday.
Adding that later versions of the system will need two to three times that processing capacity, he told the Times: “To be able to do all the computation you need for a fully automated vehicle, you can almost never have too much processing power.”
An Intel spokeswoman who confirmed the upcoming announcement told the newspaper the company would start with providing Delphi and Mobileye the Core i7 chip, and would later move to an unnamed, more powerful chip that will be unveiled in a few weeks.
Delphi already makes its own radar and laser sensors, and Mobileye supplies it with cameras and software. The company also announced on Aug. 1 a tie-up with the Singapore government to test a driverless car service in the city-state.
Intel shares were up 0.2 percent during both regular and after-hours trade Monday on Nasdaq. Delphi shares, in contrast, slipped 1.78 percent during trade on the New York Stock Exchange and another 1.3 percent during after hours. Mobileye, meanwhile, closed regular trade Monday on NYSE 0.93 percent lower but climbed back 0.13 percent after hours.
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