Arm unveils consortium for autonomous vehicle computing

Autonomous vehicles are exceedingly complex to develop, so Arm announced a consortium today to tackle the various safety and computing problems in a collaborative way.

Dipti Vachani, senior vice president of automotive and embedded at Arm, announced the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium during a keynote at the Arm TechCon 2019 conference in San Jose, California.

The consortium includes General Motors, Nvidia, Denso, Toyota, Bosch, Arm, Continental, and NXP.

Vachani said a lot of people including, like herself, mothers of 16-year-old drivers — are worried about the safety of both human-driven and autonomous cars. To make sure that technology from different providers works well together, the consortium will collaborate on issues such as safety, security, computing, and software. No single company can do all this, she said.

“This will require an enormous amount of attention to issues such as safety, security, computing, and software,” Vachani said.

Vachani said that, as a mother, the stats about driving deaths mortify her. And Forrester Research’s data shows that autonomous driving experts are all worried about the same thing.

“As all of you already know, a mother’s instincts are always correct,” she said.

Everyone in the self-driving car ecosystem will have to optimize workloads for computing devices such as central processing units, graphics processing units, image sensor processors, and machine learning. The group will enable companies to do things such as pre-vet applications still in development.