Intel has officially announced the launch of an expanded product portfolio and new partnerships, designed to accelerate automakers’ transitions to electric and software-defined vehicles (SDVs).

According to certain reports, Intel will now offer a whole-vehicle platform, which includes high-performance compute, discrete graphics, artificial intelligence (AI), power management, and zonal controller solutions. This it will offer alongside the Intel® Automotive Virtual Development Environment (VDE) co-developed with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

More on that reveal how the whole value proposition treads up a long distance to address automakers’ cost and performance scalability challenges, while simultaneously enabling faster, more efficient, and more profitable SDV development and deployment.

Intel’s whole-vehicle platform is basically designed to cut down on inefficiencies of traditional fragmented approaches to vehicle architectures. You see, by optimizing the entire vehicle’s electrical/electronic architecture, Intel can generate significant cost reductions and performance improvements. Complementing this would be the availability of Adaptive Control Unit (ACU), which is again tailor-made made for electric vehicle (EV) power trains, and zonal controller applications.

Talk about this ACU on a slightly deeper level, we begin how it happens to be a new kind of processing unit capable of supporting the consolidation of multiple real-time, safety-critical and cybersecure functions, applications, and domains into a single chip. To understand the significance of such a development, it must be acknowledged that traditional time and sequential processing-based micro and zonal controllers have long struggled when handling multiple workloads because of limited deterministic processing capabilities.

In response, Intel’s new family of ACU devices arrives on the scene an ability to integrate a flexible logic area that offloads real-time control algorithms from the CPU cores. This it does to ensure reliable performance, freedom from interference (FFI), and deterministic data delivery even when consolidating multiple microcontroller workloads into a single zonal MCU. Such a setup, like you can guess, allows for greater workload management, reduction in cost, as well as enhancement of safety, cybersecurity, and performance.

In case that wasn’t enough, when used in the context of an electric vehicle power train, the ACU U310 can be expected to support advanced algorithmic solutions that reduce vehicle energy demand from the battery, automatically adapting high voltage and control frequencies to individual driver styles and road conditions. As a result, Intel’s ACU can reduce cost per kilowatt and scale up energy efficiency. By doing so, the technology helps vehicle reclaim up to 40 percent of the power train system energy losses, and therefore, access 3% to 5% efficiency boost during the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP).

The stated system, in essence, can lead to increased range, faster charging, a more responsive driving experience, reduced per-vehicle bill of materials (BOM), electric motor size, and battery costs compared to traditional approaches. Beyond that, ACU’s programmability enables it to serve as a first-of-its-kind software-defined zonal controller, a zonal controller which can adapt to different vehicle topologies and applications.

“Intel automotive is bringing innovative solutions that reduce cost in the SDV revolution. Our whole-vehicle approach, combined with cloud integration, delivers a complete solution that drives down total cost of development and deployment while empowering automakers to build the future of mobility faster, more efficiently and more profitably,” said Jack Weast, Intel Fellow, vice president and general manager of Intel Automotive.

Moving on, Intel also launched the second-generation Intel® Arc™ B-series Graphics for Automotive, set for production by the end of 2025. Going by the available details, the stated solution provides the high-performance compute which is needed for more advanced in-vehicle AI workloads, next-generation human-machine interface (HMI) engines, and immersive in-vehicle experiences. On top of that, once you place that next to an Intel AI-enhanced SDV SoC, the technology can deliver scalable performance for complex AI tasks, supported by the vast Intel AI ecosystem.

Among other things, we must expand upon Intel’s link up with AWS to introduce an Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment on AWS, which makes for a groundbreaking approach that ensures true hardware and software parity from cloud to car. This approach is basically designed to mitigate challenges throughout the vehicle development life cycle.