The Chinese automotive industry is moving from a new stage of "lacking chips and soul" to a new stage of "having both chips and soul" and being independently controllable. At the Innovation and Technology Day held on the 27th, NIO announced that the first self-developed 5-nanometer advanced intelligent driving chip "Shenji NX9031" has been successfully taped out, and at the same time, it released the vehicle wide operating system "SkyOS · Tianshu" designed for AI.
NIO founder, chairman, and CEO Li Bin said in an interview with Xinhua Finance reporters, "The automotive industry has become the high ground of technological innovation. Electrification is the first half, and intelligence is the second half. The most important and fundamental capabilities of intelligence are chips and operating systems. Only with 'chips and souls' can we truly have long-term competitiveness
Chinese car companies achieve breakthroughs in underlying core technologies by combining chips and operating systems
When cars shift from functional products to intelligent mobile terminals, the underlying technologies of chips and operating systems, which are "one hard, one soft" and "one heart, one soul", become the two high points of industrial competition and the winners and losers of industrial development.
It can be understood that hardware is the limbs, torso, and energy heart of a car, determining the lower limit of product experience; Software is the soul of cars, the core of product differentiation, and determines the upper limit of product experience. As the core hub connecting hardware, software, and users, the importance of automotive operating systems is self-evident.
Li Bin said that the Shenji NX9031 is the world's highest performance 5-nanometer advanced intelligent driving chip, and successful chip fabrication is not easy. Good chips, large computing power, and powerful ISP performance can make intelligent driving safer. But without a robust and advanced AI oriented global automotive operating system, the "high-end" intelligent hardware capabilities cannot be fully utilized. Therefore, NIO spent 4 years and invested more than 20000 people to develop the SkyOS · Tianshu operating system, laying the foundation for intelligent cars.
Wang Xin, Secretary of the Party Committee of the School of Computer Science at Fudan University, told reporters that in the future, cars will be called mobile machines, and in addition to conventional automotive technology and battery technology, there will also be computer artificial intelligence technology. The industry says that "software defines cars", and operating systems and core chips will play an important role in the future automotive industry.
Wang Xin said that Chinese new energy vehicles have a great influence globally, but they still face significant challenges due to the influence of the international political and economic environment. Breakthroughs in key hardware in the core operating system field of automobiles will undoubtedly further enhance the competitiveness of China's automotive industry.
After more than a decade of development, China's intelligent electric vehicles have not only become the world's largest in terms of quantity, but also continuously broken through in terms of underlying technological capabilities. The chip and operating system released today are a response from NIO. We work together with our peers to 'roll up' the underlying capabilities and promote the progress of core technological capabilities in China's intelligent electric vehicle industry, "said Li Bin.
How to bid farewell to the "lack of chips and soul" underlying core technology and walk the path of autonomy well
Strengthening the research and development of key core technologies, and fighting the battle for the localization of scientific and technological instruments, operating systems, and basic software is one of the important tasks for China's scientific and technological development.
Miao Wei, Deputy Director of the Economic Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, once called in 2022 that without solving the problem of "chip shortage and soul shortage", China's automobile industry cannot go fast or far. Car companies have long recognized the constraints of chip shortage on industrial development, but without an operating system, no matter how strong the chips are or how well the cars are made, they are all building tall buildings on the sand.
In the field of automotive chips, Chinese automotive and technology companies have already begun to layout and catch up in order to avoid supply chain and geopolitical risks. In addition to NIO, SAIC, Geely, BYD, and Xiaopeng have all invested in automotive chip research and development. Start up companies such as Horizon Robotics and Black Sesame have emerged in the market.
The task of automotive operating systems is even more arduous. According to a report by the China Automotive Technology Research Center, the development of underlying basic operating systems is a systems engineering project with high development difficulty and long development cycles, requiring a large amount of manpower and financial resources. Therefore, basic operating systems are mainly monopolized by foreign countries.
The authoritative experts in the industry said to reporters earlier that the PC operating system is the base of program operation, the smartphone operating system is the cornerstone of mobile Internet, and the automobile is a complex industrial ecosystem more complex than PC and mobile phones, spanning energy, communications, Internet and other fields. Cars have both personal and social attributes, involving user travel safety, information security, and supply chain security. Therefore, autonomy and controllability are the inevitable path.
Previously, the field of vehicle operating systems in China was mainly focused on secondary development, with core technologies still being controlled by others and no industrial development ecosystem formed. As the scale of intelligent vehicles gradually expands, the significance of an autonomous and controllable vehicle wide operating system cannot be overstated.
Industry insiders say that in the field of intelligent electric vehicles, China is at the forefront of the world, and traditional foreign automotive operating systems can no longer fully meet the development requirements of "new" cars. It is necessary to explore our own path in the unknown, lay a solid foundation, accumulate and develop, and achieve acceleration and overtaking.