Waymo has revealed it built a custom 5 nanometre (nm) ASIC chip for its sixth-generation self-driving system, which powers its Ojai robotaxi. The company stated this week that the chip is designed to manage the large volume of raw data before it reaches the central processing unit of the self-driving system.
The Ojai robotaxi, which has 13 high-fidelity cameras, is now available to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Waymo claims the custom chip provides more than 1,000 trillions of operations per second (TOPS) of computing performance, placing it in a similar performance range to Nvidia’s latest DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor.
Waymo asserts that this chip contributes to a system with “unmatched efficiency and performance,” enabling fast and safe reactions in complex, high-density urban environments. The company is collaborating with partners including AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC on its compute efforts.