Autonomous vehicles are widely seen as the next multibillion-dollar business for computing. In the near future, cars will not only drive on their own but eventually generate four terabytes of information from onboard sensors every hour and a half. This conclusion is made by Intel, who is betting big on self-driving cars.
According to VentureBeat, Intel is currently engaged with 33 “tier 1” automakers, and it has partnerships with car suppliers such as BWM and Delphi. Even though Intel is now busy testing self-driving cars, many critics believe that the company still has a long road ahead. Self-driving cars need to have dozens of radar, stable system network and camera sensors that can generate 45 terabits of data per hour.
As previously reported, autonomous cars will need a 5G network connection in order to successfully communicate with servers, which will enable cars split-second decisions ability. The final autonomous vehicles that will hit the road are said to needing 15 to 20 teraflops or 10 to 20 times the computing power than the usual cars existing today. To achieve this, Intel builds a new Advanced Vehicle Lab in San Jose, California, this week.
Kathy Winter, general manager and vice president of automated driving solutions at Intel, said that she is "taking things we already know but making them automotive-grade." It looks like Intel is making all the right moves since Winter is previously positioned as the vice president of Delphi's software and services for automated driving. The mobile business of Intel launched too late, however, its effort on having a nice project when it comes to autonomous vehicles seems like a good decision.
Along with BMW and Delphi, Intel showed off the first-ever highly automated vehicles at the event of Silicon Valley Innovation Center for Autonomous Driving. This new self-driving car is the pioneer car that the companies will be testing soon on the US roads, according to Engadget. Aside from that, Intel has also launched an artificial intelligence division of its own that will be working on the connectivity of the autonomous car.
