Weilai and AMD are now "cooperation oolong" and "shake hands and make peace" after several tongue battles

Due to a "misunderstanding", the car manufacturer Weilai had a "cooperation oolong" with the semiconductor company AMD.

On June 6, AMD (AMD) posted on its social account that its EPYC series processors empower the NIO HPC platform to provide powerful computing support for the efficient operation of high-performance simulation applications.

After that, Ma Lin, senior director of corporate communications at Weilai, forwarded the Weibo and said that there is no cooperation with AMD, and there is no discussion on cooperation at present, and AMD has not been authorized to carry out this communication.Said AMD's move is very regrettable, and asked AMD to delete the Weibo.

On June 8, AMD issued a response to the matter: Weilai purchased servers for HPC research and development, and these servers used AMD EPYC processors based on the "Zen 3" architecture.It is expected that the two sides can carry out extensive cooperation in the future.

AMD's official website shows that the EPYC series processors used by NIO this time are AMD's latest data center CPUs that use 3D chip stacking in the world. The processor is based on the "Zen 3" core architecture, which further expands the third-generation EPYC processor. series of products.In this "collaboration", NIO will use AMD's EPYC series processors in its high-performance computing platform to help speed up AI deep learning training, save costs and shorten product development cycles.However, the scope of cooperation between the two is limited to vehicle research and development. AMD will not provide in-vehicle processors for Weilai vehicles, which means that Weilai will not replace AMD's Ryzen processors like Tesla.

According to public information, NIO has previously used NVIDIA's chips a lot. ES8, ES6 and EC6 are all equipped with NVIDIA's X1 car chip.Moreover, NIO’s self-driving technology also makes extensive use of Nvidia’s GPUs.

On June 9, Ma Lin, senior director of corporate communications at Weilai, once again responded to the "cooperation" with AMD: "There was some misunderstanding between the two parties before. My previous Weibo statement was too strong, and I felt that it was a bit exaggerated after I posted it. . This reflects that my public relations class has not yet graduated. Some netizens also pointed out to me that this may not be appropriate, and I humbly accept this. AMD is a very respectable company. Come and work for Blue Sky Coming's vision."

AMD said that the EPYC (Xiaolong) processor can provide assistance in CAE simulation, design and testing such as CFD fluid mechanics, structural simulation, and collision simulation."With the help of AMD EPYC, the NIO HPC platform can handle about 240 simulation tasks per day, a year-on-year increase of 50%. The server procurement cost will be reduced by 30-40% year-on-year, and the TCO savings in the next 3-5 years are expected to exceed 50% further shortens the vehicle R&D cycle, brings new vehicles to market faster, drives business growth, and navigates the future."

Caijing.com car query found that the full name of HPC is "High Performance Computing", which is the abbreviation of high-performance computer group.Refers to a computer that can perform large amounts of data and high-speed computing that cannot be processed by ordinary personal computers. Its basic components are not much different from the concept of personal computers, but the specifications and performance are much stronger.

HPC provides centralized control of vehicle systems and is equipped with secure gateway functionality for cloud service connectivity.In the context of multi-ECU integration, HPC has begun to undertake more complex functions and the central brain of big data inside and outside the vehicle through the MCU+SoC computing platform.At the same time, HPC also needs to support high-bandwidth automotive applications, including critical safety functions (for example, redundant backup of ADAS, providing backup for advanced intelligent driving domain controllers) and vehicle OTA management.

IHSpredictsthat the global automotive SoC market will reach US$8.2 billion in 2025. After 2025, autonomous vehicles above L3 level will enter the market on a large scale, and supporting high computing power and high-performance SoC chips is more conducive to improving the added value of vehicles. In-vehicle SoC chips usher in a good opportunity for development.The "CPU+GPU+XPU" multi-core SoC chip is the mainstream technical route of the current smart cockpit chip manufacturers.

According to a report recently released by Sinolink Securities, TSMC predicts that the growth of the HPC automotive business will remain strong, and is optimistic about the benefiting industry chain.Wei Zhejia, President of TSMC, said that the demand for mobile phones, PCs, tablets, etc. has weakened, and other market segments, especially in MCU, power, military IC, etc., still have very strong demand, and predicts that in the second quarter of 2022, HPC and automotive business growth will still be strong.

Northeast Securities pointed out that automobile intelligence will promote the explosive growth of automobile software development demand.A “digital” car (in 2015) can have 100 million lines of software code, much higher than the code size of high-tech products such as Facebook, fighter jets, and satellites.With the development of intelligent modules such as smart cockpit and autonomous driving, the amount of automotive software code is still increasing sharply at an annual growth rate of more than 20%.

The amount of code for a smart car produced in 2025 is expected to reach 700 million lines, an increase of 2.3 times compared to 2020.It can be seen that the technical barriers of automobile manufacturing have also changed from the integration capabilities of the traditional three major components and components to the capabilities of code research and development. With the continuous upgrading of automobile intelligence and the gradual prosperity of the software ecosystem, the demand for automobile software development will explode. , the proportion of vehicle software costs will increase significantly.The scale of the automotive software market will continue to expand.

Berylls Management Consulting expects the automotive software market to more than triple in size between 2020 and 2030, with an average annual growth rate of 13%, from 76 billion euros to 252 billion euros.Specifically, the field of intelligent driving (ADAS/AD) will occupy the largest share of the growth of the automotive service market from 2020 to 2030, and software platforms, security and integration testing and verification will also have a high compound growth rate. Of course, the growth rate The fastest will be high-performance computing platforms (HPC), which are expected to reach 37 percent.

In fact, this time, Weilai and AMD have "understanding errors" in "whether or not to cooperate", because the two sides are not directly related to the upstream and downstream industries, and there is a layer of supplier role in the middle.The official introduction shows that AMD is an innovative technology company dedicated to the development of computing and graphics processing solutions for commercial, home and gaming fields. It is an integrated platform supplier that can also provide CPU and GPU chipsets.

AMD released its 2022 Q1 results on May 3. According to the data, the company’s revenue reached a record high of US$5.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 71% and a month-on-month increase of 22%. For seven consecutive quarters, it achieved a year-on-year growth of more than 45%, with a gross profit margin of 48%. %, an increase of 2 percentage points year-on-year; excluding the newly acquired Xilinx, revenue increased by 55% year-on-year to a record high of US$5.3 billion, and gross profit margin increased by 5 percentage points to 51%.Q1 cash flow reached a record $995 million, the company repurchased $1.9 billion in stock this quarter, and announced the latest $8 billion repurchase plan, which currently totals $8.3 billion in repurchases.