2024-03-13 09:41:00
www.techspot.com
What just happened? Apple’s much-hyped car project was canceled recently after a decade of development and more than a billion dollars of investment. Thanks to the secrecy surrounding the vehicle, not much is known about it yet, but a new report now claims that the car could have been powered by a super-powerful custom chip equivalent to four M2 Ultras combined.
The news comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who claimed that the chip was being developed by the Apple Silicon team that generally designs the processors that power the company’s iPhones and MacBooks. Terming the new chip as the car’s “AI brain,” Gurman said that its development had almost finished before Apple decided to abruptly end its automotive ambitions.
The exact specifications of the chip remain a mystery, but just to put things into perspective, a single M2 Ultra consists of 134 billion transistors and comes with up to a 24-core CPU, a 76-core GPU, and a dedicated 32-core neural engine. It powers the latest MacBook Pro laptops and the Mac Studio desktop, making them among the fastest client computers in their respective segments.
Now that the Apple Car project is said to be dead in the water, it remains to be seen if the company will repurpose the new chip to power other devices or use technology from it for future projects.
Codenamed “Project Titan,” Apple’s super-secretive and highly ambitious car project is believed to have kicked off in 2014 under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook. Over the past decade, the company was said to have experimented with various ideas for the vehicle before eventually pulling down the curtains amid policy indecision over whether to make a standard all-electric Tesla competitor or a fully autonomous vehicle with state-of-the-art self-driving technology.
When Project Titan was still alive, Apple reportedly negotiated with various traditional automakers, including Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Volkswagen, McLaren, and Tesla, to build its high-tech car. While none of them publicly spoke about those negotiations, the one company that did confirm its talks with Apple was Hyundai.
In January 2021, the South Korean automaker confirmed that it was holding discussions with the American tech giant about possibly manufacturing the latter’s autonomous electric car. However, nothing came of that as Hyundai executives were reportedly worried about a culture clash with the American company.