What’s at stake?
The Nvidia-Arm deal idles at the intersection of U.S. politics, Jensen Huang’s promises and China’s long ambition to become the world’s tech industry leader. How badly does Huang want to get this done? How big a chunk of Nvidia’s technology arsenal is China looking to gain? And how fiercely will U.S. anti-China hardliners fight the proposed M&A? At stake is the future of U.S.–China relations.
What’s at stake?
Germany’s recently passed autonomous-vehicle regulations earned the country bragging rights as the first in the world to bring legal certainty to Level 4 AVs, in which automated driving features do not require human intervention.
Lawyers working for the U.S. AV industry, and those looking to score political points, maintain that delayed regulations in America could hamstring automakers in the global AV race. What’s really at stake, however, is public safety. Will AV rules under development in the United States come with enough muscle to help AV manufacturers raise public confidence in the long-term safety of driverless vehicles?
Read More »U.S. Lawyers Perpetuate Regulation Myths at The Autonomous
Early industry speculation, since debunked, was that Apple was making manufacturing deals with Hyundai and Kia. Earlier this year, Korea Times reported an Apple deal with “a joint venture of LG and Magna.” A report this month from Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper, however, says that Apple may go it alone.
Veteran auto industry observers put Magna high on the “likely” list. Automotive industry analyst Egil Juliussen called Magna “the most competent manufacturer” of vehicles but speculated that Apple “might recruit several different manufacturers.”
Read More »Apple Car: Makers & Sensors
What’s at stake?
Phil Magney, founder of VSI Labs, often says that Tesla is “a proxy of the future vehicle.” What, then, will Apple Car become? Will it be Tesla on steroids, a safer and more secure Tesla, or just a more transparent version of Tesla?
The departure of Doug Field, who resigned as the head of Apple’s car project (codenamed Titan) and jumped ship to Ford Motor Co. earlier this month, generated a fresh round of speculation that the car project at Apple might be stalled. We disagree with that analysis.
Read More »Unlocking Apple Car’s Supply Chain
Batteries are “by far the most expensive part of BEVs,” automotive industry analyst Egil Juliussen noted. “Supply chains are tricky.”
The big hitch in EV batteries is that there’s “so much new tech, new battery manufacturing, potential supply chain upheaval,” he said. However, he believes, “Apple will have a backup plan via China connections if the better technologies are not ready in time.”
Read More »What About EV Batteries?
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Rising economic nationalism is causing fissures in the global semiconductor supply chain. The rifts are threatening the IC market at a time of rapid growth, when it most needs to retain the collaborative and unified structure that has driven its expansion over several decades. As economic powers like China, the EU, and the United States move to militarize the global electronics supply chain to achieve their geopolitical objectives, companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. are caught in the fray. How TSMC and its competitors respond to these geopolitical pressures will determine whether the industry will continue to grow unhindered or enter a phase of extreme uncertainty and uneven product development.
Debates over the safety of autonomous vehicles boil down to one simple question: Is a machine driver safer than a human being?
Beliefs and convictions abound among both experts and lay people on the topic of robocars. Yet, today, no regulators, no carmakers, no AV startups, and no industry organizations appear ready to answer the $64 billion question with certainty.
Read More »Will Aurora ‘Do the Right Thing’?
by Bolaji Ojo
Intel Corp. and GlobalFoundries do not belong together. If there is any truth to the recent Wall Street Journal report that Intel is considering purchasing the contract chipmaker, the board of directors should snuff the life out of that bizarre idea. That’s because Intel’s long-term success lies in the opposite direction.
Rather than lead the consolidation of the foundry market, Intel should take the bolder step of spinning off Intel Foundry within the next year, freeing the foundry business to service customers across the globe and evolve to become a more competitive rival to market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC).
A spinoff of Intel Foundry as an independent, publicly traded company has numerous attractions. The new enterprise would be able to raise the billions of dollars it needs to fund new fabs, expand operations globally, catch up to TSMC in next-generation process technology, and, critically, attract more customers. Data generated from customers across multiple markets is one of the secrets behind TSMC’s success. The information provided by customers has fueled innovations in manufacturing as well as process technology. This is sorely lacking at Intel Foundry, which has principally served the parent company and a handful of external customers.
Read More »Intel Foundry: A Spinoff is Necessary (and Inevitable)
It’s one thing to ridicule Elon Musk for realizing, belatedly, that real-world AI is easier preached than done. Last week, in a tweet, Musk wrote: “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.”
Read More »Can ADAS Aid Us on a Dark and Stormy Night?
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) order this week requiring carmakers and tech companies to submit crash reports involving vehicles equipped with highly automated features — including both Automated Driving Systems (ADS)and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) — is a sensible move.
It’s also wildly out of character. Known for its hands-off approach to automakers, NHTSA has traditionally permitted automakers a lot of leeways including self-certifying their own vehicles with new technologies.
