Kathy Winter is going to spend a lot of time in the garage. But she’s not a mechanic. Winter is the vice president and general manager of automated driving solutions at Intel. She helped dedicated the new Intel Advanced Vehicle Lab in San Jose, Calif., this week.
Intel is engaged with 33 “tier 1” carmakers, and it has alliances with car suppliers such as Delphi. While the company is testing self-driving cars now, it still has a long road ahead. Self-driving cars will have dozens of Lidar, radar, and camera sensors that can generate 45 terabits of data per hour. They will need 5G connectivity, or multiple gigabits per second wireless broadband, to communicate with servers that can help the cars make split-second decisions. The final cars that hit the road are cars are going to need around 15 to 20 teraflops, or 10 to 20 times the computing power that is in cars today.
Winter’s job is to help make that happen. Before joining Intel in August 2016, she was an engineering executive at automotive supplier Delphi. This week, I visited Intel’s new Advanced Vehicle Lab in San Jose, Calif., and went for a ride in a self-driving Audi powered by Delphi and Intel. Then I spoke with Winter about the technology.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
VB: I felt like a normal driver. It shifted lanes more quickly than I might have done, if I were gradually shifting over into a right turn lane, but I’m sure it looked behind and didn’t see anything. I’m never 100 percent confident that there’s nothing behind me.
Kathy Winter: It’s interesting you say that. Over time—these cars are very conservative. There’s the whole trust factor. Does it really know? But one thing that’s improved over the last 12 months is the more human-like driving style. It’s programmable. When you think of different OEMs—some vehicles let you put them in sport mode, versus economy mode. It’s sort of like that. They can tune it to be more aggressive or more conservative.
VB: On the one hand, having gone for the ride, it seems like self-driving cars are very close. But when I hear about how much data has to be processed, it sounds farther away.
Winter: You hit it right. The technology is there. Even on the data center side, when you think about how we think of it—there’s the compute in the car itself. There’s the networking, the connectivity to the cloud, and on up to the data center. Each of those parts of the autonomous driving picture are there today and being worked.
Bringing them together is something unique for Intel. We can go to the teams that are experts in 5G, because they’re working on it anyway for things like industrial applications and smart cities. They have a huge data center business. We spend time working with them now on doing the automotive-grade applications. What do you layer on there from a function, safety, temperature perspective — all the things that go along with being in an OEM vehicle for a long time?
The things that are pacing it now – the technology is moving along very quickly – are things like regulation, insurance, liability. And especially user acceptance. Is it comfortable? Do you trust it? Getting people, in a much broader way, to experience it so they can trust and believe in the vehicles is going to take real time and effort compared to just the technology itself.
VB: It seems like 5G would gate it in some way as well, since you have so much data to transfer.
Winter: Today’s vehicles that are out there are built on existing platforms. The amount of data coming out is growing, and it can still be managed with a 4G connection. Maybe you download some of that data when you’re within reach of wi-fi, or you’re even swapping drives today. But when you start to think about the amount of data as you increase to fully autonomous vehicles, that’s a lot of data coming off. Thinking about the resolution of the vision systems, of radar and lidar, continually increasing—that’s data-intensive. And then you bring in HD mapping.
You don’t have to have 5G, clearly, to have fully autonomous vehicles, but it brings a lot to the overall solution, to your ability to have big bandwidth going to and from the vehicle, and very little latency or delay. If it’s mission-critical, you want that to happen in a split second. You always have a lot of processing going on in the vehicle, but there are things that we like to—if we see an…