Horizon Robotics Founder Criticizes Inflated Marketing Metrics for Autonomous Driving Chips
Horizon Robotics founder and CEO Yu Kai published a social media post criticizing the autonomous driving chip industry for excessively inflating marketing performance metrics, introducing satirical terms like 'equivalent' or 'bragging' computing power. He announced that Horizon will adopt a dual-labeling system to reflect both standard NV metrics and inflated equivalent metrics. This rare public critique from a major industry CEO sheds light on widespread marketing practices and metric inflation within the intelligent vehicle and AI chip sector. It highlights the challenges automakers and consumers face when trying to accurately compare hardware performance across different competing brands. Yu Kai noted that while Nvidia chips are typically marketed at twice their dense computing power, some companies in the industry now inflate their numbers by 6 to 7 times. Consequently, Horizon's Journey 6P chip will feature a standard 'NV computing power' of 560 TOPS alongside an inflated 'equivalent computing power' of 1,960 TOPS.
## BACKGROUND
Autonomous driving chip performance is frequently measured in TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), representing integer processing capacity. Dense computing power refers to a chip's peak performance without exploiting sparsity features, whereas structured sparsity can theoretically double the nominal throughput by skipping zero-value calculations.