Chinese Automotive Firm NIO Unveils Industry’s First 5nm “Smart Driving” AI Chip, NX9031 With 50+ Billion Transistors & 32 Big.Little Cores

NIO, a Chinese automobile manufacturer, has showcased the world's first 5nm autonomous driving chip, claiming it has been successfully taped out and is ready to disrupt smart automotive markets.

NIO is a renowned automobile firm, particularly in China. The firm is known for its role in reshaping the domestic EV markets by offering luxury and performance simultaneously.

However, the company has recently stepped into the chip business, well to some extent, by coming up with an in-house solution that isn't only one of a kind but also offers significant capabilities. NIO has unveiled its automotive-focused chip, the Shenji NX9031, designed to take smart driving to a whole new level.

The local media is categorizing the development as a breakthrough for the automotive markets, claiming that the performance of the Shenji NX9031 chip has exceeded expectations. To top it all off, the firm claims that the chip has already passed the "tape-out" stages, which means that mass production isn't that far away, although the firm hasn't specified the timeline. NIO's Shenji NX9031 is the industry's first 5nm automotive chip, potentially competing with the likes of NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin SoC in terms of its capabilities.

Speaking of capabilities, the Shenji NX9031 is built on a 5nm process and offers more than 50 billion transistors. The chip is built upon a 32-core design which features a BIG.little configuration, and support for LPDDR5x memory for speeds up to 8,533 MT/s. The chip itself houses over 50 Billion transistors.

Significant performance capabilities are expected to be disclosed soon as well. The Shenji NX9031 employs a pixel processing capacity of 6.5G/s, with a response time of less than 5ms, showing that the chip is indeed designed for modern-day adoption, meeting the standards of current markets. NIO also states that the new architecture brings a 6.5x improvement in transformer, a 4x uplift in LiDAR, and a 4.3x improvement in BEV capabilities.

The showcase event held by NIO disclosed the sample performance of the Shenji NX9031 automotive chip, which unveiled the image processing capabilities. The samples show that the chip was able to significantly enhance quality under low-light environments, and the company claims that these results are much higher than what the industry's current flagship automotive chips offer.

NIO hasn't disclosed plans for its cutting-edge Shenji NX9031 chip, but it seems well-positioned to provide tough competition to mainstream alternatives, such as those from MediaTek and NVIDIA.

News Source: Weibo