Increasing numbers of companies are hopping into the autonomous car race, and now ARM has thrown its hat into the ring with its new Cortex-A76AE chip.
The chip is based on ARM’s Cortex-A76 design since it can handle machine learning while also being very efficient. The AE variant stands for ‘Automotive Enhanced,’ and it has a few different microarchitecture upgrades for functional safety and application flexibility.
Additionally, ARM claims the main benefits of the new Cortex are safer autonomous systems, better performance for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems and autonomous driving and the ability to run different programs at different levels of Automated Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL).
The most significant change overall in the Cortex-A76AE is the addition of new safety features that bring it up to par with modern vehicles.
Specifically, the chip supports a ‘Split-Lock’ features that allow it to continue to run in a degraded mode if other parts of the system fail. To learn more about Split-lock, ARM has put together a blog post explaining the technology.
All of this new technology is important to maintain the chip’s balance between performance, reliability and efficiency. Self-driving car chip advancement is something that isn’t thought about often, but without it, all of the sensors and code that cause the car to run will fail.
ARM is trying to future-proof this industry a little bit by providing a single chip that’s packed with the power, the safety and features to last in the market for a few years.
Source: ARM
