Rivian Unveils High-Performance Autonomous Driving Chip At Autonomy And AI Day

This development marks a significant milestone in the company’s pursuit of autonomous driving capabilities. Rivian’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, revealed the chip’s details during the company’s first Autonomy and AI Day, held at its Silicon Valley headquarters. The newly designed chip, dubbed Autonomy Compute Module 3, boasts impressive processing power, capable of handling 1600 sparse INT8 TOPS and 5 billion pixels per second.

To put this into perspective, Rivian claims this setup will quadruple the capabilities of its current Nvidia-chip-centered system. This achievement is all the more remarkable considering Rivian did not manufacture the chip itself, instead opting to design and house it in-house. Rivian’s senior vice president of electrical hardware, Vidya Rajagopalan, emphasized the significance of this in-house design. Rajagopalan, who previously worked on the Model 3 at Tesla and for several silicon and systems companies, noted that Rivian’s collaboration with ARM and utilization of the company’s microprocessor enables the automaker to add substantial value to its neural engine.