Huge news in the automotive world — Intel is acquiring computer vision supplier Mobileye for $15 billion.
Intel has been working on self-driving cars from multiple angles, including partnerships with BMW and Delphi and Mobileye, as well as standalone compute platforms. But NVIDIA has emerged as the dominant supplier for automotive processors, and Intel’s had a hard time catching up.
With the purchase of Mobileye, Intel will come at autonomous vehicles from a whole new angle — as a sensor and computer vision supplier.
This is an area that Mobileye has dominated, so Intel is essentially buying its way into that vertical. Presumably the plan is to use Intel’s manufacturing and marketing power to scale this business dramatically, and use it to tie back to Intel computational platforms.
It seems like a pretty good plan, although it remains to be seen if Intel will allow Mobileye to take advantage of NVIDIA GPUs.
