Toyota shows off SoC that stores model weights and its OS on integrated memory

Toyota is the major shareholder in a company called AISIN, a manufacturer of automotive components. Both companies are aware that cars are increasingly reliant on tech like image recognition, and that robotics and other forms of “physical AI” will need parts that overlap with cars. AISIN thinks existing chips aren’t a good fit for such roles, because they rely on external memory to store AI models and then generate a lot of traffic between a processor and the model.

That traffic, the company contends, makes image recognition and other on-device uses of AI less effective. DRAM is also currently vastly expensive. The company’s response is a system-on-chip built on a 16nm FinFET process, an Arm Cortex A53 dual-core CPU, plus an Arm MaliG31 GPU.