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The Apple Car never saw the light of day, but recent reports have revealed that the project known as “Titan” was canceled after 10 years and billions of dollars spent. Apple had ambitious plans for its electric car, like having an advanced autonomous driving system. And to make this a reality, the company reportedly developed a chip equivalent to four M2 Ultras combined.
Apple Car would have a chip equivalent to four M2 Ultras
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said in a Q&A on Monday that the Apple Silicon team was “heavily involved” in the Apple Car project before it was shut down. According to the journalist, the company was putting a lot of effort into the “AI brain” of the car, which would be powered by a custom Apple Silicon chip.
This new chip would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultras chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was “nearly finished” before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.
The end of the Apple Car project
Apple had been working on a car project since 2014, under the direction of Tim Cook. Over the last 10 years, the company has experimented with different ideas and prototypes. A recent report revealed that the company even tried to negotiate with Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Volkswagen, McLaren, and Tesla to build the Apple Car.
However, due to the challenges of building a fully autonomous car as Apple executives wanted, the company later reconsidered the project with a less ambitious approach. Still, building a car seemed too complicated for Apple, and the company put an end to the Titan project last month. The project cost Apple around $1 billion a year.
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