China’s Xpeng to use own autonomous driving chip on par with Nvidia Thor: reports

Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Motors will start using its chips for advancd driving functions inside an upcoming car model in the current quarter, rather than the second half of the year as earlier planned, chief executive He Xiaopeng told the South China Morning Post. “Our chips will be seen in our cars all over the world in future, once the (related) policies open up,” he said ahead of Xpeng’s Global Brand Night in Hong Kong on Tuesday, without giving other details. The artificial intelligence computer chip could offer about 700 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of performance, similar to Nvidia’s next-gen autonomous driving chip, the DRIVE Thor, according to people familiar with the matter, Chinese media 36Kr reported on Tuesday. The new “Turing” chip will contain neural processing units (NPU) capable of training a large language model with more than 30 billion parameters, the report said. Parameters in AI are variables that the algorithm takes into account to improve reasoning ability. [South China Morning Post, 36Kr, in Chinese]