CES 2025: Intel gears up for automotive drive

Intel has unveiled an expanded product portfolio and new partnerships designed to accelerate automakers’ transitions to electric and software-defined vehicles (SDVs), including an automotive virtual development environment co-developed with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The chip giant describes its approach in the sector – with services unveiled at CES 2025 – as looking to address automakers’ cost and performance scalability challenges, enabling faster, more efficient and more profitable SDV development and deployment. Intel believes it can now offer a whole-vehicle platform, including high-performance compute, discrete graphics, artificial intelligence, power management and zonal controller offerings.

Drilling deeper, it said a whole-vehicle platform reduces inefficiencies of traditional fragmented approaches to vehicle architecture, and that optimising a vehicle’s entire electronic architecture can lead to significant cost reductions and performance improvements.

Among the key announcements was the Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment on AWS, described by the two IT giants as a way to ensure true hardware and software parity from cloud to car. The offering is designed to address challenges throughout the vehicle development life cycle, enabling engineers to switch between virtual and physical hardware setups.

It integrates Intel Xeon processor-based Amazon EC2 instances and, for the first time, incorporates Intel’s Automotive SDV SoCs in the AWS environment, with the objective of eliminating the need for expensive electronic control unit simulators or developer boards. The firms believe their collaboration provides a unified service that accelerates innovation, reduces R&D costs and speeds time to market.

Supporting the new platform, Intel has also introduced the availability of the adaptive control unit (ACU), designed for electric vehicle power trains and zonal controller applications, and to alleviate problems caused with traditional time and sequential processing-based micro and zonal controllers, which Intel said can struggle to handle multiple workloads due to limited deterministic processing capabilities.

The ACU U310 supports the consolidation of multiple real-time, safety-critical and cyber-secure functions, applications and domains (X-in-1) into a single chip, and the new ACU family integrates a flexible logic area that offloads real-time control algorithms from the CPU cores to offer reliable performance, freedom from interference and deterministic data delivery even when consolidating multiple microcontroller workloads into a single zonal control unit. The claimed result is greater workload consolidation, lower cost, and enhanced safety, cyber security and performance.

Already, automotive firms are examining the technology. Stellantis Motorsports has selected Intel as a key technology partner, adopting the Adaptive Control technology into its next-generation inverter control for enhanced performance and efficiency in competitive racing environments. In this implementation, the Intel technology will control the electric motor and recover energy during braking phases. The inverter plays a crucial role during a Formula E race, where any gain in efficiency is transformed into a precious competitive advantage.

In a further deployment, Karma Automotive is to support Intel’s ACU, showcasing an Intel co-branded inverter featuring optimal pulse pattern control algorithms to improve efficiency and enable four unique driving profiles, including innovative features such as torque ripple reduction and range boost.