New Entrants Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm to Push Automotive Head-unit Processor Revenues to $1.95 Billion by 2020

Automotive head-unit processor revenues are expected to grow from $680 million in 2013 to $1.95 Billion in 2020.

“Automotive head-units are transitioning from proprietary architectures requiring long development cycles and Tier1-led integration efforts towards platform designs. Ford set the tone back in 2007 with its SYNC solution based on CPU hardware from Freescale and the Windows Embedded OS allowing quicker development time frames and independence from the previously dominant Tier1 suppliers. With head-unit infotainment, HMI, clusters, safety, and telematics complexity continuing to increase, hardware approaches are consolidating and evolving towards reference designs and open platforms such as the open source GENIVI stack, already adopted by BMW. This allows car OEMs to increase the reuse of software and middleware while decreasing costs and time-to-market and at the same time leveraging open ecosystems of suppliers,” says VP and practice director Dominique Bonte.

Consumer chipset vendors such as Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and NVIDIA are increasingly targeting automotive as a new business development opportunity, hereby competing with established automotive chipset suppliers such as Freescale, Renesas, TI, and STMicroelectronics.

While automotive semiconductor vendors still enjoy the highest market shares in computing processors (Freescale) and Bluetooth (CSR), consumer chipset players such as Qualcomm and Broadcom already have the highest market shares in cellular baseband and Wi-Fi chipsets respectively.

Newcomers in automotive computing processors such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Intel are just starting to grab market share but will become major players in the future driven by platform approaches and automotive grade chipset designs. They are keen to leverage their multi-core CPU architectures and graphics engine assets to capitalize on the sharply increasing need for real-time in-vehicle computing for advanced multimedia, ADAS machine vision image processing and ultimately autonomous vehicle algorithms.

These findings are part of ABI Research’s Automotive Infotainment and Automotive Safety and Autonomous Driving Market Research which covers OEM and aftermarket telematics, infotainment and connected car solutions, ADAS, active safety and autonomous vehicles.Market Research which covers OEM and aftermarket telematics, infotainment and connected car solutions, ADAS, active safety and autonomous vehicles.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 70+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.