Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Qualcomm sign. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm, the dominant provider of cellular modem chips, is the latest chip giant to seek a slice of the autonomous driving market. At the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Ride platform, which uses chips derived from Qualcomm's mobile products to help a vehicle drive.

It might seem strange for a smartphone chip company to tackle self-driving, but in reality, many of the same technologies exist in both products. Qualcomm has long leveraged its mobile chip lead to grab a significant chunk of the broader system-on-a-chip market. Smartphone makers buy Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that contain an ARM-based CPU, modem chip, and various support chips.

In recent years, Qualcomm and other mobile chipmakers have been including increasingly powerful GPUs and dedicated AI chips in their SoC products—precisely the kind of silicon required for driving software based on machine learning. So it's not much of a leap for Qualcomm to launch a new SoC that includes (as Qualcomm's press release puts it) "high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy-efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, industry-leading GPU."

• 

  You know how there are two kinds of concept car—the "almost on production" kind and the "we still haven't invented half the stuff in here" kind? The Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR concept is the latter. [credit: Mercedes-Benz ]

Mercedes-Benz has gotten into the habit of bringing some rather forward-looking concept cars to CES. Two years ago, the company gave some of us late night rides down the Las Vegas Strip in its Smart Vision EQ concept car, even if that was actually a remote-controlled show car rather than a functional self-driving machine. I'm not on the ground at CES this year, so I didn't get to see this year's Mercedes concept in person, but it looks even more out there. It's called the Vision AVTR, and the name is a clue—it was designed together with the people responsible for the movie Avatar. Yes, really.

Like most of us who saw the 2009 sci-fi film from James Cameron, I can't remember much about it other than that it had elements of Dances with Wolves, but in space with blue giants, plus mining for "unobtanium" (which must have been discovered by the British, or it would surely have been called unobtainum). Looking at the photos Mercedes has released of the Vision AVTR aren't helping fill in those gaps, but based on the description, it too requires some unobtainium—or at least some enabling technologies that have yet to be invented.

Mercedes says that the car uses graphene-based batteries that are biodegradable and use no rare-earth elements. (Graphene batteries are a thing people are working on, but it's still the preserve of our Science section rather than anything showing up any time soon in a car you could buy or drive.)