Track Hyper | Guide to Smart Cars: The Battle between MediaTek and Qualcomm

The smart phone market is in a slump, with no sign of recovery, and core SoC chip designers are accelerating their expansion into the new market space of automotive chips (cockpits).

In May of this year, two mobile SoC chip design giants, Qualcomm and MediaTek, announced partnerships with Zhongke Chuangda and NVIDIA respectively. PC chip giant Intel is also not to be outdone, announcing a partnership with Lenovo to capture the commercial market for car networking.

Today, as a typical hardware collection terminal, cars are becoming "soft", and the ability boundary of software is determined by hardware. Broadly speaking, software is a comprehensive solution that integrates hardware and forms a synergistic whole, requiring high-performance hardware and full-stack software to be fully integrated.

From mobile SoC for smart phones to the automotive smart cockpit market, the global chip design giants are engaged in an unspoken battle.

MediaTek Automotive SoC + NVIDIA AI Capability

On May 30th, MediaTek and NVIDIA jointly announced that they will cooperate to provide a complete AI intelligent cockpit solution for software-defined cars.

MediaTek will develop an automotive SoC that integrates NVIDIA GPU chips, with NVIDIA AI and graphics computing IP: supporting interconnect technology, which can achieve smooth and high-speed interconnectivity between chips. The first automotive smart cockpit SoC chip developed by the two parties is expected to be released in 2025 and put into mass production in 2026-2027.

At the same time, MediaTek's intelligent cockpit solution will also run NVIDIA DRIVE OS, DRIVE IX, CUDA and TensorRT software technologies, providing all-round AI intelligent cockpit functions such as graphics computing, AI, functional safety and information security.

Cai Lixing, Vice Chairman and CEO of MediaTek, revealed that this cooperation with NVIDIA was first proposed by NVIDIA founder and CEO Huang Renxun, and the two parties are expected to expand their cooperation to more fields in the future. Huang Renxun admitted, "This is my idea, and it's really a very good idea."

This cooperation is not the first time for the two parties. Previously, MediaTek and NVIDIA jointly promoted the ARM-based Chromebook processor and GeForce GPU: integrating desktop GPU architecture and mobile SoC technology.

This means that MediaTek will add NVIDIA GPU chips to the Dimensity Auto Tianji smart cockpit chip package provided to car manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers in the future. These GPUs will use a technology called chiplets and achieve integration through chiplet packaging technology. The main chip manufactured by MediaTek and the NVIDIA GPU are connected by a proprietary ultra-high-speed interconnect.

On April 17th, MediaTek released the Dimensity Auto Tianji automotive chip platform, which includes four parts: Dimensity Auto cockpit platform, Dimensity Auto connection platform, Dimensity Auto driving platform and Dimensity Auto key components. To meet the demand for strong computing power, low power consumption, and high process ICs in intelligent cockpits for new energy vehicles, MediaTek will develop Dimensity Auto cockpit platform products using 3nm advanced process technology.

In summary, Dimensity Auto includes an intelligent cockpit solution based on high-performance flagship SoCs, as well as a digital base based on an interconnect solution, both of which are synchronized with Qualcomm's corresponding automotive product line.

Currently, MediaTek and NVIDIA have different focuses in the automotive market. NVIDIA's early products include Xavier and Orin. In September 2022, NVIDIA released a new generation of autonomous driving chip Thor to replace Orin, with a computing power of up to 2000 TOPS, which can achieve cockpit and driving integration and become the central computing unit of the car.

From an application perspective, most high-end domestic car models choose NVIDIA Orin chips for assisted driving. If combined with NVIDIA's core professional advantages in AI, cloud, graphics technology, and software, as well as NVIDIA's ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) solution, MediaTek will further enhance the overall technical performance of the Dimensity Auto Tianji automotive chip platform.

For car dealers or users, this means having the option to call up the NVIDIA DRIVE platform for the in-car infotainment platform; and the terminal cockpit driving solution that integrates MediaTek and NVIDIA can also call up NVIDIA's advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) capabilities.

Huang Renxun said, "From the perspective of company strategy, technology roadmap, and cooperative relationship, I believe that we will become a pillar that the automotive industry can rely on."

If we refer to Qualcomm's standard of dividing digital cockpits into "performance level, flagship level, and ultimate level" three software and hardware solutions, MediaTek's corresponding solution will adopt a strategy of "starting from high-end and gradually entering the mid-range and entry-level".

The automotive field is currently one of the few continuously growing segments in the chip market. Therefore, since the smart phone market has stagnated, mobile SoC design companies have collectively moved towards the automotive chip market.

According to a Gartner report, the market size of in-vehicle infotainment and dashboard SoCs will reach 12 billion US dollars by 2023. Counterpoint predicts that the autonomous driving chip market will reach a scale of 30 billion US dollars by 2030, and the compound annual growth rate from 2022 to 2027 will reach 26.3%. By 2024, 60% of the autonomous driving chip market will come from L2 assisted driving.

Qualcomm and Zhongke Chuangda layout networked cars

Unlike MediaTek's recent shift to automotive cockpit chips and interconnect solution brands, and its announcement of an ecological cooperation with NVIDIA on May 30, Qualcomm has been targeting this field since 2002 and has been laying out its automotive business. So far, Qualcomm has released four generations of intelligent cockpit chips and almost dominates the domestic new energy vehicle intelligent cockpit chip market with Snapdragon 8155. On May 26th, Qualcomm China announced a partnership with Zhongke Chuangda to establish an intelligent network-connected vehicle innovation center. This is the sixth joint innovation center that Qualcomm has built with Chinese partners (the first five are located in Nanjing, Chongqing, Qingdao, Nanchang, and Hangzhou), and it is also Qualcomm's first intelligent network-connected vehicle-themed joint innovation center in China.

During the partnership, Zhongke Chuangda will provide support for intelligent network-connected vehicle operating systems and software, while Qualcomm will mainly provide hardware support such as chips. The joint innovation center will provide industry research and development support, application scenario cooperation and construction support, roadside construction support, and technical services for ecological partners.

Meng Pu, Chairman of Qualcomm China, said that Qualcomm is very optimistic about the intelligent network-connected vehicle industry and hopes to bring the successful experience of assisting in the creation of the intelligent smartphone mobile ecosystem into the intelligent network-connected vehicle field. Zhao Hongfei, Chairman and CEO of Zhongke Chuangda, said that Qualcomm and Zhongke Chuangda are in the upstream of the entire computing and connectivity industry. In the next few decades, China's automobile industry will undergo some fundamental changes due to mobile communication and computing.

In terms of the cooperation between MediaTek and Qualcomm's ecological partners, MediaTek focuses more on the development of high-process SoCs and the expansion of automotive smart cabin chips, while Qualcomm places more emphasis on the construction of intelligent network-connected vehicle ecosystems.

Meng Pu believes that "there are actually two different industrial technological revolutions taking place in China's automobile industry, one is new energy, and the other is intelligent network-connected vehicles. These two technologies, which were originally unrelated, have developed in sync due to their similar timing of emergence."

It should be said that Qualcomm focuses on intelligent network-connected vehicles, which is because Qualcomm has been involved in automotive mobile computing for more than 20 years. Compared with MediaTek, Qualcomm has begun to delve into the field of automotive mobile communication. As 5G becomes a universal wireless connection platform, the definition of mobile terminals has expanded from the relatively narrow scope of smartphones to almost all terminals, including cars.

From the trend of intelligent network-connected vehicles, cars are also intelligent terminals, and therefore have many new development directions. Qualcomm uses the "Snapdragon Digital Chassis" to carry this trend. This is a complete digital platform for intelligent network-connected vehicles developed by Qualcomm, which includes the Snapdragon Automotive Intelligence Platform, digital cabins, intelligent driving, and vehicle-to-cloud solutions.

Given that cabin driving integration has become a trend in automotive development, "the car (thus) becomes a computing center, supporting all applications and algorithm operations. Through cabin driving integration and vehicle integration, the cost of the entire car will be greatly reduced, while simplifying manufacturing, production, and the entire line and design." Zhao Hongfei believes that "the corresponding operating system will also be improved and upgraded, and Zhongke Chuangda will also launch a vehicle operating system to respond to this trend."

It is worth mentioning that in addition to Qualcomm and MediaTek, two intelligent smartphone mobile SoC design companies, PC chip manufacturer Intel is also eyeing the intelligent connected vehicle market.

On May 18th, Lenovo and Intel jointly demonstrated two commercial landing projects for connected vehicles in Chongqing for the first time: Intel is responsible for providing hardware products and software development kits, while Lenovo is responsible for smart transportation and connected vehicle solutions.