Cars are now smartphones and tablets writ large. And the chips that are going into them are making them smarter, providing better data throughput for entertainment and output for big data, and processing multiple systems simultaneously. This makes automotive another battleground for chip manufacturers.
Nowhere was this more evident than at last month’s CES, where the North Hall could easily have been mistaken for the Detroit Auto Show. For the past several years, the car industry has shown its wares increasingly at CES. The car is the power consumer electronic device – it brings transportation, roadway information source, entertainment, and home-away-from-home comfort, together with (and this is what excites us at RCR) telecommunications.
What started years ago with OnStar has now developed into a multi-sensor network endpoint that communicates over a variety of wireless networks at any given moment sending and receiving big data packets.
RCR was able to get a look under the hood, talking to Qualcomm and Nvidia about their automotive chip offerings. Take a look:
