EV maker Nio has developed a 5nm processor for self-driving
Chinese car manufacturer Nio has unveiled a five nanometer SoC that it claims is comparable to Nvidia's A100 market-leading processor.
The firm says its system-on-chip Shenji NX9031 5nm processor packs 50 billion transistors, and is 4x more advanced than Nvidia's Drive Orin X, which it currently uses for its self-driving systems.
The Shenji NX9031 was developed by the company internally and comprises 32 general-purpose Arm cores, a neural processing unit, a graphics processor, and an LPDDR5X memory subsystem. It can process data from LiDAR, unlike processors used by Tesla that rely on data from video sensors. It also complies with ASIL-D risk and safety requirements.
It is unclear which companies are working with Nio on the Shenji NX9031 and whether they are also Chinese. That said, Nio is not currently blacklisted by the US government, so it is free to order components from overseas suppliers such as TSMC, Samsung Foundry and Intel.
The Shenji NX9031 SoC will appear first in Nio's ET9 model, which will ship in Q1 2025.
