Intel just paid 15 billion dollars for a automotive self driving tech company.
Yes, it’s a lot of money, but why is the question. Why would a chip maker get involved in self driving cars?
Because the Internet is too slow.
You can’t just put a camera and a wifi point on a car and have a big computer somewhere on the net watch the camera and decide if that ‘thing’ in the camera is a stop sign, a tree or a lolly pop. By the time the image goes up, the decision made and the answer sent back, the car is long past the question.
So, all the processing needs to be done in the car. And it is a LOT of processing, and it needs to be done accurately, and it needs to be done very very fast.
To pull this off, the car needs to be a mobile computer server farm. A whole bunch of computers all talking together working the problem with some massive amounts of code. This is why Intel put the money down. They want to make sure their computer chips are the ones in the cars. They need to buy into the tech so they know what sort of chips they need to make. Buying into the tech so they can have their finger on the pulse and know where it’s going and make chips that the software guys need before they need it is a very smart move.
If I was commuting in traffic, I would take a loan out to get a self driving car to try and remove some of the stress, but since I am not, and since I love driving back roads, and since I love the actual driving part, I am not the least bit interested in actually owning a self driving car, but I love the tech and the reasons behind it.
