Arm chips help Mercedes-Benz’ drive for perfection

Mercedes is wheeling out Arm technology based on expertise working in the Cambridge company’s world-leading ecosystem of developers.

Dipti Vachani, Arm Senior VP and GM of Automotive, and Magnus Östberg, Mercedes-Benz Chief Software Officer, have been exploring the impact of AI on the next generation of software-defined vehicles.

The startpoint premise for the collaboration is to delivery safety and comfort hand-in-hand: With increased automation and electrification and a growing focus on user experience, the automotive industry is seeing major disruption.

A high-end car today has more than 100 million lines of code and new features and business opportunities continue to be powered by software upgradability.

Arm is working with the automotive industry on standards to help improve safety, enable innovation and agility, deliver advanced features and support new business models driven by the software-defined vehicle.

Mercedes-Benz says it is redefining mobility with Arm technology. It has been raising the automotive bar for over 130 years and is now maintaining that relentless pace of innovation in a new era for in-car technology.

Powered by over-the-air (OTA updates), this next-generation of Three Pointed Star vehicles offer fresh features for owners long after the vehicle rolls off the production line.

“Arm is a central piece of the compute of the core in our main partner chips that we're leveraging today,” says Östberg. He said a car’s operating system to meet a customer’s every need must be constantly evolving.

He added that every vehicle had to be pretty much unique to each individual customer through the software it contains.

The company has different safety validations in each vehicle. A car’s autonomous driving and infotainment systems operated separately through compute and Mercedes ensured that they didn’t impact on each other.

He said Arm’s continuously evolving chips were central to the evolution and customers would start to see even more benefits with the Spring launch of new models.

Arm technology was a game-changer in a highly competitive landscape and was helping Mercedes in terms of speed to market with its technology evolution, Östberg added.

Dipti Vachini has been central to the launch and ongoing curation of the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), a collaborative effort toward delivering safe fully self-driving.

She says: “Arm Automotive Enhanced solutions provide a foundational compute architecture and IP that make it easy for partners to innovate, deliver AI capabilities throughout the vehicle, and help accelerate software time to market. Arm and our partner ecosystem deliver these technologies to help the industry build the future of automotive.”

• As one of several planned launches Mercedes-Benz has teased a new electric luxury van that will be revealed in spring 2025.