Waymo unveils custom 5nm asic chip for autonomous vehicles

Waymo, a self-driving taxi company under Alphabet, has revealed its custom-built 5nm ASIC chip designed specifically for real-time processing of sensor data and advanced machine learning tasks. The chip is part of a broader computing system that delivers data center-level performance while operating within the constraints of an automotive environment. The system has seen a 20-fold increase in computational power over the past eight years, with ultra-low latency software minimizing the delay between data capture and actionable output. The system is also built for resilience, featuring dual computing engines that provide redundancy and enhanced reliability in extreme conditions. The computing architecture integrates heterogeneous components, including CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and advanced machine learning technologies. In addition to sourcing off-the-shelf components, Waymo has developed its own custom chip to further enhance system performance. The 5nm ASIC is designed to process raw data streams from LiDAR, radar, and cameras, extracting critical information and feeding it into the inference engine for sensor fusion machine learning models. The chip itself provides over 1000 TOPS of machine learning compute power, dedicated to front-end processing and machine learning tasks.