Once the cornerstone of the PC chip industry, Intel showcased its latest innovations in the automotive sector at CES 2025, focusing on the transformational needs of electric vehicles (EVs) and software-defined vehicles (SDVs). The company unveiled a suite of comprehensive vehicle platform solutions and key technologies. Below is a detailed summary of Intel's automotive offerings and announcements from CES 2025:

Intel's Automotive Product Philosophy: Concept of Complete Vehicle Platform Solutions

• ACU (Adaptive Control Unit): A single chip replacing multiple MCUs
• AI Chip for the Cabin: Arc B Series automotive-grade discrete graphics cards
• Intel's Vehicle Virtual Development Environment (VDE)

This overview aims to help you understand Intel's automotive product line and explore the development path and strategic thinking behind automotive chips.

Intel's Automotive Product Philosophy: Concept of Complete Vehicle Platform Solutions

Intel has a profound understanding of current automotive trends: vehicles are evolving into software-defined cars with advanced electronic and electrical architectures; reducing energy consumption emphasizes sustainability, driving efficient energy management, cost reduction, and lighter vehicle weights; power and performance chips are scalable, promoting the cross-model application of compatible chips.

Leveraging its chip expertise, Intel is entering the intelligent electric vehicle industry from three angles: software-defined vehicles, zonal controller electrical and electronic architectures, and energy efficiency improvements.

Intel has introduced a comprehensive vehicle platform encompassing modules such as high-performance computing, automotive-grade discrete graphics cards, artificial intelligence (AI), power management, and zonal controllers.

Intel aims to assist automakers in optimizing their electrical and electronic architectures, lowering development costs, enhancing performance, and accelerating the development and deployment of SDVs.

Intel claims to be the sole chip company offering holistic solutions to the automotive industry.

ACU (Adaptive Control Unit): Replacing Multiple MCUs

Applying its PC chip experience to automobiles, Intel has developed a new ACU concept that consolidates multiple functions originally handled by multiple MCUs into a single ACU chip, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs. Intel highlighted that special modes in current intelligent electric vehicles, like camping mode and guardian mode, often necessitate waking up non-essential devices, such as the central controller, leading to unnecessary energy consumption. With ACU, it can adopt the dynamic variable voltage scaling seen in PC computers to minimize system switching losses by selectively lowering system frequency and voltage.

Currently, ACU is designed for electric vehicle powertrain systems and zonal controller applications, alleviating issues caused by traditional microcontroller and zonal controller-based time and sequence processing.

At CES 2025, Intel unveiled the ACU U310, a new processing unit used in electric drive inverter controllers, tailored for electric vehicle powertrain and zonal controller applications. It integrates multiple real-time, safety-critical, and cybersecurity functions into a single chip, supporting all-in-one powertrain domain control. The ACU U310 can dynamically adjust high voltage and control frequency based on driving style and road conditions, reducing battery energy demand, recovering up to 40% of powertrain system energy loss, and improving efficiency by 3% to 5% in WLTP (Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure) energy consumption tests.

Currently, the ACU U310 chip is primarily used in high-performance niche vehicles. For instance, Stellantis Motorsports and North American Karma Automotive, funded by Wanxiang Group, have announced the adoption of ACU technology. Intel's current partners might seem like a throwback to a bygone era; partnering with popular manufacturers could yield more significant results.

Cabin AI Tool: Arc B Series Automotive-Grade Discrete Graphics Cards

Firstly, it's unclear why Intel labels it a graphics card. Clearly, NVIDIA's edge AI computing, discussed in the previous article "2025 CES NVIDIA Insights: Agentic AI/Physical AI Rapid Deployment, the Future is Here," is more cutting-edge and appealing.

In reality, Intel's Arc™ B Series should be used in conjunction with other CPU chips. The current chip boasts 200 TOPs of computing power and 12GB of memory. Besides supporting next-generation HMI (Human-Machine Interface) engines and immersive in-car experiences akin to high-performance computing required for AAA PC games, it also supports the local execution of large language models and other generative AI. Regarding performance, Intel demonstrated at CES 2025 that its previous-generation A Series chip scored three times higher than Qualcomm's 8295 and MediaTek's 8673 on AnTuTu benchmarks.

For voice assistants powered by in-vehicle localized large language models, cloud processing is currently the norm. Intel's chip supports local model processing, reducing delays in voice control. At CES 2025, Intel showcased products from its partners, all of which were Chinese: Baichuan, Beike Ruisheng, and Zhipu's in-vehicle localized language large model assistants.

The graphics card will commence production by the end of 2025.

Intel's Vehicle Virtual Development Environment (VDE)

While general development requires a test bench, the VDE developed by Intel in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) ensures consistency of hardware and software from the cloud to the vehicle. This environment integrates Amazon EC2 instances based on Intel® Xeon® processors, supporting virtualized development and testing, and reducing reliance on costly hardware simulators.

VDE aids engineers in seamlessly switching between virtual and physical hardware setups, accelerating vehicle software development and verification processes, reducing R&D costs, and shortening time-to-market.

Summary

The emperor of the PC era actually ventured into the automotive industry alongside the electrification of automobiles in 1976, but the booming PC business likely didn't attract much attention from Intel at the time. However, with intelligent vehicles now spearheading the implementation of Physical AI, Intel, having missed the mobile internet era, presumably doesn't want to miss out on the Physical AI era. So, does Intel have an opportunity in the era of intelligent vehicles?

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Intel CES 2025 Keynote Presentation pdf