An Apple car may never see the light of day, but that doesn’t mean the company hasn’t developed some impressive tech while the project is still alive.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has developed an extremely powerful chip to power an Apple car. During a Q&A session on Monday, Gurman said the chip is nearly complete and “equal to four M2 Ultras combined.”
M2 Ultra is the chip built into Mac Pro and the most powerful configuration in Mac Studio. It has up to 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, and 32-core neural engine, and supports up to 192GB RAM. Modern cars do require very powerful silicon; for example, the Tesla FSD (Full Self-Driving) chip has 12 ARM CPUs inside it, with a total of 6 billion transistors. But if Gurman’s information is correct, Apple’s chips may dwarf that number, since a single M2 Ultra chip has 134 billion transistors.
Apple was rumored to have spent billions of dollars building self-driving cars for a decade, but the project was reportedly canceled in favor of focusing on Apple CarPlay.
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Gurman also shared some other tidbits related to Apple’s now-abandoned Apple Car project and the company’s ongoing CarPlay project. For example, he doesn’t think Apple will sell or license technology developed for Apple’s car project, even though “a significant portion of the material could be reused in the company’s own future products.”
As for CarPlay, Gurman thinks Apple is “fully committed to developing new CarPlay” and the feature runs across iPhones, but going forward, he thinks “Apple should really embed its own software and hardware into the car itself,” something Google has already done a little. Android Automotive is complete.