$16B is a great price for Mobileye's team, but I am not sure it is the best move for Intel. But I guess Intel will try to sell package deals to car markers and thus use this to try to keep NVIDIA and ARM from locking up the in-car market. Thus it is a strategic move on Intel's part to fend off competitors rather than reflective of the intrinsic value of Mobileye. BTW what was Mobileye's revenue last year and profit m…
There is urgency in the market around autonomous vehicles - for better or worse, it is believed that it will be the next big technology market - but I think that the Nvidia push around it is the main thing spurring Intel.
> But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. When you're running a electric motor that pulls power on the magnitude of 1 * 10^5 W (i.e. 100 kW+) I doubt you care about a few extra watts total power load if you have an inefficient processor. Similarly for conventional fuel, an extra few watts on the load is hardly going to worry the alternator.
OK. I've worked on several EVs with 100kW motors. Lets do some math. A really good EV takes around 200 to 250 watt-hours per mile. On the EPA urban drive cycle you average just under 20 miles per hour. If you have 100 miles range, that will take around 5 hours in urban driving. A 40 watt load for 5 hours is 200 watt-hours. Your Intel processor running near 100 watts is going to cost you 2.5 percent of the range. Or i…
You're stuck in the mindset that the consumer CPUs that you can purchase are the only ones Intel can make. They can and do make custom chips, extremely custom, for large customers and government agencies. It would be very, very easy for them to mass produce a chip that drops all the unnecessary features for an "appliance" like self-driving cars.
Worst case in a few years they can write down 16 billion or some amount and they can lower their taxes. Effectively the government will pay for part of the purchase.
In the same way that the government pays for part of your salary?
More like tax credits. For example you can buy an EV and knock some money off your taxes. For example supposed a company makes 5 billion they have a 30% tax rate. They would owe 1.5 billion. Supposed they bought a company for 6 billion. They realized next year hey the company is really only worth $1 billion. They write off the 5 billion which offsets the 5 billion profits so instead of the paying 1.5 billion in taxes they pay 0. So government basically ended up paying 25% of the purchase price.
Mobile chips is low margin, there is hardly any money in it anyway.
That's right, but then when did they spent so much on mobile R+D?
Partially because they felt they could gain some advantage by owning the client side of what is powering a lot of their data center chips. Investing in modem tech and trying to get into mobile phones, they could have a completely integrated story from the phone, modem, cell tower (see Axxia acquisition), to the data center. I think they also were hoping the Intel Security story would be compelling from an end-2-end perspective.
Yeah, they're old school. They've got all sorts of deep industry partnerships and various driver assist and safety products. What they don't have is a Level 4 autonomous driving OS. Nobody does, it doesn't exist yet. The whole 3 ring circus of chipmakers, OEM's, and various component suppliers that stand to benefit from Autonomous vehicles is held aloft by a single tentpole that doesn't actually exist yet. It's just…
What about a a car that can only do level-4 on the highway, but that can very reliably sense when it's near an urban area, and tells the driver to take control ? maybe we're close to that ?
> But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. When you're running a electric motor that pulls power on the magnitude of 1 * 10^5 W (i.e. 100 kW+) I doubt you care about a few extra watts total power load if you have an inefficient processor. Similarly for conventional fuel, an extra few watts on the load is hardly going to worry the alternator.
OK. I've worked on several EVs with 100kW motors. Lets do some math. A really good EV takes around 200 to 250 watt-hours per mile. On the EPA urban drive cycle you average just under 20 miles per hour. If you have 100 miles range, that will take around 5 hours in urban driving. A 40 watt load for 5 hours is 200 watt-hours. Your Intel processor running near 100 watts is going to cost you 2.5 percent of the range. Or i…
Let's look at it a different way. The MacBook battery is 55 watt-hours, the Tesla battery is 100 thousand watt hours. They both run their respective workloads for a similar amount of time. So, less than a tenth of a percent?