Honda Motor Co., Ltd. and Mythic, a US-based hardware innovation company specializing in Artificial Intelligence hardware, have jointly agreed on a development collaboration that aims at creating an analog chip that is suited for automotive usage and boasts energy efficiency benefits that are 100 times better compared to digital processors used in Artificial Intelligence applications. This emerging analog System-On-Chip technology is set for adoption in future software-defined Honda vehicles, representing quantum leap technology for Artificial Intelligence computing on vehicles.
The collaboration brings together Honda’s expertise in the field of automotive systems and safety together with Mythic’s disruptive Analog Compute-In-Memory technology in innovative ways that integrate compute and memory in the same layer to minimize the power-hungry movement of data. Together, this technology has the potential to significantly accelerate AI performance within power constraints necessary for automotive systems.
The Core of the Breakthrough
Traditional AI chips, like GPUs, operate with separate memory and compute units. This results in frequent data transfers that consume significant energy and limit real-time performance in power-constrained environments like vehicles. Mythic’s analog architecture, by contrast, performs computation directly within the memory plane — a method that is hundreds of times more efficient in terms of performance per watt.
Under the joint development initiative:
Honda R&D Co., Ltd. will license Mythic’s Analog Processing Unit (APU) technology.
The partners will co-develop automotive-qualified SoCs capable of topping 100,000 TOPS-with strict power constraints-a performance scale previously achievable only in data centers.
Prototypes are expected to enter vehicle testing by the late 2020s/early 2030s, with production following successful validation.
Dave Fick, Co-Founder and CTO of Mythic, called modern vehicles “petascale supercomputers on wheels” that in the near future will require data center–class processing power within stringent power limits-a goal this analog AI chip is targeted at.
Why It Matters for the Automotive Industry
The automotive industry is rapidly evolving from mechanical engineering towards integrated AI-enabled software and data platforms-especially with the proliferation of autonomous driving, advanced driver-assist systems, and over-the-air connect services.
1. Power Efficiency Unlocks AI Everywhere
Vehicles of the future – particularly SDVs – will run sophisticated AI for perception, decision-making, navigation, and predictive diagnostics. However, onboard power is limited compared to data centers. The analog AI architecture developed by Honda and Mythic addresses this constraint head-on, delivering 100× the AI compute within existing power budgets. This efficiency gains make it feasible to embed advanced AI systems in nearly every vehicle control domain without compromising battery life or thermal limits.
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2. Driving Safety and Autonomous Capabilities
Not only is this partnership with Mythic significant in terms of efficiency, but it also complements Honda’s “Safety for Everyone” vision and overall safety goals within the industry. Clearly, this increased SoC processing capability will allow for more complex perception and control algorithms, greatly benefiting ADAS and also future autonomous driving capabilities, which rely on live AI.
3. Software-Defined Vehicles and Continuous Innovation
Software-defined vehicles, in which software manages functionalities and can keep updating them without changing hardware, need scalable and updatable AI platforms. An analog AI chip that supports running large contemporary machine learning models from vision transformers to physics-informed control networks can help in creating vehicles capable of being updatable in the field, thereby extending product lifetimes and increasing customer value.
Business Impacts Across the Automotive Ecosystem
Reducing Energy Constraints on Innovation
For example, for OEMs like Honda, the benefits of increased energy efficiency in AI can be reduced thermal loads and easier integration of electric powertrains. This has the potential to increase overall efficiency and range of vehicles, particularly electric and hybrid vehicles.
Enabling Smarter, Safer Mobility Experiences
Advanced AI capabilities will benefit consumers directly – from more responsive driver assistance to personalized infotainment and predictive maintenance. Socalled “cloud-like” intelligence on board enhances the user experience and can differentiate brands in a competitive market.
Transforming Automotive Supply Chains
Pursuing custom AI SoC devices is driving car makers deeper into semiconductor design and integration, a market normally dominated and controlled by tech firms. This move has been changing the auto supply chain and driving auto makers and tech startups like Mythic together to co-create customized hardware tailored to specific needs within the auto industry.
Economic and Competitive Advantages
The fact that a car can operate with efficient energy sources like powerful AI processors means that vehicles can reduce their dependency on expensive sensors or cloud connections when it comes to its core functionalities. This places automakers who invest in high-end AI hardware at a competitive advantage, especially since car technology is moving towards autonomous technology.
Conclusion
The partnership between Honda and Mytic represents a technology inflection point in the Automotive industry that is driven by a new kind of computing that reaches beyond the digital age and enters into the analog age of efficiency. In fact, as the role of AI computing becomes more and more integral to the performance, safety, and experience of cars, such efficient hardware innovations are likely to determine not only how cars are made, sold, and driven, but how they will be made, sold, and driven in the future-every single one of them a powerful computer on wheels.