A fully scalable, power-efficient CVflow family of SoCs, these devices are able to provide the automotive industry’s highest AI processing performance, at up to 500 eTOPS, representing a 42x increase over Ambarella’s previous automotive family.
With up to 16 Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU cores, the CV3 provides up to a 30x boost in CPU performance over the prior generation in support of autonomous vehicle (AV) software applications.
This family has been developed to provide centralised, single-chip processing for multi-sensor perception - including high-resolution vision, radar, ultrasonic and lidar - as well as deep fusion for multiple sensor modalities and AV path planning and deliver more robust ADAS and L2+ to Level 4 autonomous driving (AD) systems with greater levels of environmental perception in challenging conditions for both driver viewing and machine perception.
“With our new CV3 AI domain controller family, we are now capable of running the full ADAS and AD stack with a single chip, while providing unprecedented performance and power efficiency,” said Fermi Wang, President and CEO of Ambarella. “Through enhancements to our on-chip ISP, along with simultaneous radar processing that can take advantage of our Oculii adaptive AI algorithms, Ambarella is helping the automotive industry unlock greater levels of perception accuracy across all environmental conditions to realize the promise of autonomous driving.”
The CV3 marks the debut of Ambarella’s next-generation CVflow architecture, which continues the company’s algorithm-first design philosophy. This has driven the development of the on-chip neural vector processor (NVP), with up to 500 eTOPS of AI compute, industry-leading power efficiency and support for the latest advancements in neural network (NN) inferences.
The NVP is also enhanced to run advanced radar perception software, such as the Oculii adaptive AI software algorithms. This is, in turn, complemented by a new floating-point general vector processor (GVP) that's been designed to offload classical computer vision and radar processing from the NVP engines, and floating-point-intensive algorithms from the Arm CPUs.
The CV3 family’s hardware scalability allows automakers to unify their software stacks across their entire retail portfolios, while reducing the cost and complexity of software development.
This new family also supports both central and zonal architectures. In addition to covering the whole AD stack, the CV3 can simultaneously process in-cabin sensing applications, including driver and occupant monitoring.
Ambarella’s complete line of AI perception SoCs is said to be well positioned to support the full range of viewing, recording, sensing and path planning applications, from basic ADAS to L4 AVs and automakers will no longer need to develop different software stacks for their entry-level, mid-range and premium vehicles, as they can use Ambarella’s unified CVflow platform across all models, saving engineering costs while enabling faster responses to market trends.
