Rivian Shows The Teeth Of A Self-made Autonomous Car Chip That Is Superior To Tesla

JAKARTA - One of the main players in the world of electric vehicle startups, Rivian, has just made a big announcement at the "AI and Autonomy Day" event held in Palo Alto, California, United States.

The company officially introduced its own self-driving chip and outlined its ambitious plans for vehicle autonomy. This strategic move marks a significant turning point, placing Rivian a serious competitor in the race towards the future of driverless transport.

The autonomy plan will be packaged in a subscription program titled "Autonomy+", which is offered in two schemes: monthly subscriptions for $49.99, or one purchase worth 2,500 US dollars (Rp41.5 million).

Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe, stated that this system is designed to learn and become more confident and robust as distance increases, similar to Tesla's way of using neural networks and deep learning.

"Our updated hardware platform, including our 1600-sparse TOPS in-house inference chip, will allow us to achieve dramatic progress in self-driving to ultimately meet our goal of delivering L4. This represents a turning point for the ownership experience and is ultimately able to give customers time back while in the car," Scaringe said excitedly, quoted by Teslarati, Friday, December 12.

The heart of this progress is a chip developed in-house by Rivian, known as RAP1. The chip will be manufactured by TSMC, a supplier that is also used by Tesla, and is claimed to be 50 times more powerful than the chip currently in Rivian vehicles. RAP1 is capable of more than 800 trillion calculations each second and supports the Autonomy Compute Module 3 (ACM3), Rivian's third-generation autonomy computer. ACM3 has impressive specifications, including 1600-sparse INT8 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) and the processing power of 5 billion pixels per second, supported by low-account latency technology called RivLink which makes it inherently extendable.

Unlike Tesla, which implements a visual approach (vision-only), Rivian chooses a more comprehensive strategy for its sensors. Rivian's system will rely on a combination of 11 cameras, five radar sensors, and one forward-looking LiDAR sensor. The use of LiDAR, in particular, is planned to be used on upcoming R2 cars to enable SAE Level 4 automatic driving, which according to the agency's standards, allows passengers not to take the wheel at all.