Chapter 751 - 724: This is the Mastermind

"In the future, AI and automation will be the absolute trends. Under IoT and 5G technology, autonomous driving will become mainstream, greatly alleviating traffic congestion and reducing the occurrence of accidents,"

Inside the National Conference Center, Chen Jun was talking eloquently at the press conference.

Obviously, this was a press conference held by Xin’an Automotive, and many leading industry peers had received invitations and were willing to attend.

Because the subject of this press conference wasn’t a new product, nor a new generation of vehicles, but a chip.

A car manufacturer releasing a chip?

"Meet the X32025, meet the future!"

Chen Jun once again recited the slogan for the press conference, then took out a square chip slightly smaller than his palm from his chest pocket.

Lin Ju had decided to push for AI and automation, so he directly took the most powerful chip X32035 provided by the System at the beginning, only removing some features to create X32025, the main chip for autonomous driving.

The X32025 chip still adopted the 14nm silicon carbide wafer process, removing features like multiprocessor parallel computing capabilities and some floating-point computing accuracy. However, it was still the second most powerful AI chip after the X32035, natively supporting strong AI computation.

The chip that Chen Jun held high immediately attracted the attention of the audience below. However, the chip in his hand was actually the X32035; base engineers had used fly wires to disable some modules for the demonstration.

The true native X32025 had just been handed over to SinoCore International; it would take at least three to four months to receive the first batch of finished products.

"The X32025 will use an all-new silicon carbide wafer, a brand-new 14nm energy-saving process, and if converted to the traditional automotive chip computing power, would have an incredible 5600TOPS of computing power!"

No sooner had he finished speaking than a continuous coughing sound was heard from the front row.

Attendees from several new powerhouses uniformly displayed looks of disbelief, almost gasping for air.

Right now, the new forces and smart driving industries were still in the development stage. There weren’t many dedicated vehicular intelligent chips, and the concept of computing power had just begun to grow popular.

The common unit was TOPS, with 1TOPS indicating the processor can perform one trillion (10^12) operations per second. At present, the computing power required for Level 2 Assisted Driving is below 60TOPS, and for Level 3 autonomous driving, it’s around 100TOPS.

Of course, this is still the division system of traditional binary chips. Ternary chips are quite a bug in AI computing and their computing power doesn’t fully reflect the level of intelligence, but the converted 5600TOPS was still quite exaggerated.

In other words, was this several hundred times the current mainstream level?

The reaction of traditional auto companies wasn’t as strong, but they also seemed to have heard something quite remarkable.

Having finished speaking, Chen Jun deliberately observed the reaction of the peers below, feeling that it hadn’t met his expectations.

Lin Ju’s technical requirements for rolling out autonomous driving aimed to match the native X32035 paired with an SC09’s performance. Using both of the latter purely for autonomous driving would waste too much, and New Yuan’s engineers were now frantically removing unnecessary architectures.

This level of autonomous driving had already surpassed that of humans. The previous week, they had installed the X32035 and SC09 on a test electric sports car from Xin’an, competing against multiple racing drivers. In the end, the X32035 won with a decisive 12 to 4 advantage, fully maximizing the car’s performance without wasting a bit.

The performance in complex road conditions was also astonishingly good. In a simulated environment with extremely high traffic congestion, the AI, which hadn’t been completely scaled down yet, actually learned to actively cut in and ride lines, managing to charge out of the congestion area with the most agile posture.

Therefore, he received a stringent order from Lin Ju, to start rolling out autonomous driving within 2019, and by the end of 2020, at least 100,000 autonomous ride-sharing vehicles must be put into service...

That’s why they were releasing the chip now, warming up for the autonomous ride-sharing project a few months later, and also building momentum.

After the introduction of X32025 came the question and answer session.

The vice president of a new power manufacturer stood up abruptly with a microphone in hand:

"Mr. Chen, the X32025 adopts a 14nm process, but to my knowledge, there is no mature process below 28nm for silicon carbide chips domestically."

"You’re behind the times. Yellow River Semiconductor is developing a new generation of EUV lithography machines. A 14nm silicon carbide production line is set to go into operation by the end of this year. From what I know, domestic chips are undergoing rapid progress."

While answering, Chen Jun remembered the scene he witnessed a few days ago at the base. After securing the patent authorization for the 193nm light source DUV lithography machine and other supporting machinery from Modu City’s microelectronics, they spent a whopping twenty billion to finalize the EUV lithography machine supporting up to a 10nm process, which had already entered the prototype manufacturing stage.

In the past, the base needed to purchase optical components from other manufacturers, but after launching the laser project, they established their own small yet refined optical production line, which was also the most advanced in the country, capable of providing the high-precision parts required.

Yellow River Semiconductor is currently negotiating a merger with a small chip foundry, planning to locate the future 14nm silicon carbide production line there.

The only difficulty encountered now is the wafer issue. The domestic capacity for large-size silicon carbide wafers has yet to catch up, which could lead to higher costs, but that’s it.

Chen Jun’s words left others unable to refute, and in their impression, Yellow River Semiconductor always had a reputation for playing by its own rules, so it truly was hard to say.

"Next," he said.

This time, a participant from Hongmeng Zhixing stood up, and in this world line, Huawei in the automotive field was likewise divided into several factions.

He looked like a middle-aged engineer and precisely pinpointed a sensitive issue:

"Mr. Chen, it seems our country has yet to issue comprehensive regulations for fully autonomous driving. Isn’t there a legal and ethical issue with promoting driverless cars now?"

Chen Jun: "The AI is a consensus future development direction for the industry. We shouldn’t stop moving forward just because the supporting measures aren’t fully in place. The comprehensive regulations you mentioned also need to be filled through continuous trial and error. In addition, I think this colleague from our competitor has missed out on some news."

"Just before the press conference, the state has already issued the policy for the pilot promotion of fully autonomous driving. We are a qualified pilot enterprise, so there are no so-called ’loopholes’ or ’issues.’ "

The last sentence made everyone below start to wonder; they were usually well-informed, and it seemed impossible that there would be no hint of any significant regulation before publication.

It wasn’t until someone turned on their smartphone and saw the news alert, clicking in to find the policy did indeed exist, matching closely with what Mr. Chen had said.

However, upon seeing the timestamp, they were nearly stupefied.

The "Policy for the Pilot Promotion of Fully Autonomous Driving" had passed at 9 am that very morning, and the press conference had started at 9:10 am. Since everyone had entered the conference, they hadn’t paid attention to outside news, and thus knew nothing of this development.

Even the media didn’t have enough time to report this sudden and seemingly out-of-nowhere ordinance that was passed just 10 minutes before the press conference!

Moreover, from the simplified content released by the media, the "Policy" stated that enterprises meeting the pilot requirements must obtain Level 3 Assisted Driving certification. As the only company in the country to possess this qualification, Xin’an even had the authority to cooperate with the examination of other emerging automotive enterprises!

The engineer from Hongmeng Zhixing also found out only after others pointed it out and suddenly felt an urge to throw his microphone down and curse loudly.

A scandal, a blatant scandal!

From his perspective, the regulations seemed tailor-made for Xin’an, showing favoritism that could not be more blatant. And though it was supposed to be a pilot, the so-called pilot area practically included major cities in all regions of the country. How was this a pilot?