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Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

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Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#61

Post by phkahler »

gchadwick wrote: post #48
phkahler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. I completely agree. >> Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that. But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and…

> 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 if you look at costs, it's going to take that percentage of the battery cost to run it.

Sure an EV can suck 100kW or more of power, but only for a short time. And it can be put back into the battery via regenerative baking. Range is incredibly sensitive to electrical loads.

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#62

Post by petra »

dharma1 wrote: post #52

Their plan is probably to build machine learning/autonomous driving chips combining Intel's own chips/expertise, FPGA (as with their Altera acquisition) and specialist ML chips (like Movidius that they bought recently). $16B for Mobilieye as a route to market (they already have the relationships and supply chains set up with car manufacturing) sounds like a lot but Intel needs a fast track if they want to compete wit…

Once you got a really competitive system, how hard is it to build relationships and set up supply chains with car companies ?

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#63

Post by petra »

Fricken wrote: post #27

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 ?

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#65

Post by Symmetry »

dharma1 wrote: post #52

Their plan is probably to build machine learning/autonomous driving chips combining Intel's own chips/expertise, FPGA (as with their Altera acquisition) and specialist ML chips (like Movidius that they bought recently). $16B for Mobilieye as a route to market (they already have the relationships and supply chains set up with car manufacturing) sounds like a lot but Intel needs a fast track if they want to compete wit…

If you've got a good enough sense of your algorithms and have a large enough scale to be rolling your own ASIC components you probably don't need an FPGA in you chip.

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#66

Post by Fricken »

dharma1 wrote: post #53
Fricken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autopilot is floundering in the absence of Mobileye. It will take Tesla a while before their much more expensive hardware suite with 8 cameras and a Px drive chip (just the chip is worth a few thousand dollars) can match the performance of Mobileye's EyeQ3 and single camera.

Tesla would have been stuck at level 2/3 with Mobileye. With PX2 you have enough compute power to do much more, and a mature and rapidly developing GPGPU ecosystem (CUDA for ML, SLAM, SfM etc). I do think Nvidia is going to have to bring the price of PX2 down significantly though if they want mass market adoption.

It seems Tesla and Mobileye were at one time planning on a bright future together, because Tesla didn't have any kind of a back-up plan.

But Mobileye isn't sitting still, so if the relationship hadn't been terminated, Tesla would've been stuck with whatever Mobileye's latest and greatest offering might be.

What's interesting is that if you compare the HW2 sensor suite to Mobileye's next-gen sensor plans, they are very similar, almost the same. They were both working on something together before the relationship went sour.

Musk hinted recently that 1 PX2 is not enough, and that 2 may be necessary for L4. There's certainly no consensus as to how much compute is needed, the more the better, but I'm skeptical that the hardware costs will be low enough near term to justify putting it in privately owned autonomous cars. I think Tesla has made costly strategic errors in the Autonomy department, and that Musk in particular has repeatedly underestimated the challenge of developing a fully autonomous vehicle. I don't think he's making that mistake anymore.

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#67

Post by Symmetry »

phkahler wrote: post #61
gchadwick wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The power used by a processor is mostly a matter of performance rather than ISA. You might be able to make a non-x86 processor with similar performance that only takes 95 rather than 100 Watts but that's the extent of it.

The reason that ARM processors are able to take so much less power than Intel is because their single threaded performance is much lower. As single threaded performance increases linearly the power required goes up as the square of that for architectural improvements and as the cube for frequency improvements modulo FO4 delays.

Intel's Atom processors haven't gotten huge amounts of love from the parent company but for DSPish code of the sort that cars are mostly running they should perform comparably to the equivalent ARM options.

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#68

Post by kgwgk »

samfisher83 wrote: post #40
aub3bhat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as intrinsic value. There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market. Talking about PE and multiples is pointless for tech companies where synergies and rapid adoption/changes are common.

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?

Re: Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

#70

Post by ben1040 »

exhilaration wrote: post #41
WhiteSource1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collision avoidance systems (I presume OP is speaking about) is aftermarket. That's a small part of Mobileye's business, but it is based on the same technology. BMWs and other high end cars have had Mobileye as OEM for a long time, but the company itself is a bit of a legacy company and not always run well (and is based in Jerusalem which is even more legacy) - but like many Israeli tech stories has great tech.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Mobileye's aftermarket products. For the curious: http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-5-series/ http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-6-series/

I've noticed a bunch of these in Uber/Lyft cars in NYC, but didn't know what they were until I saw TechCrunch linked to a Mobileye press release about installing 4500 of these systems:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobileye-completes-i...

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