AWS for Industries

Revolutionizing automotive software development with Intel and AWS

The move to software-defined vehicles (SDV) opens the door to shorten OEM vehicle design cycles by at least 6 months, enabling innovation for new tools and processes for automotive software development. To help stay competitive on a global scale, OEMs are adopting cloud-based development environments and cloud-native software design, supporting software portability across a growing range of automotive hardware platforms. By shifting left—moving software development, testing, and validation earlier in the vehicle lifecycle— automotive software developers can address these challenges earlier.

To shift left the software development of automotive applications, it is important for OEMs to focus on creating a consistent environment across all stages of the development process. Environmental parity refers to the ability to develop software in a cloud-based environment that closely replicates the vehicle’s properties. This kind of development enables more efficiency but achieving environmental parity for automotive applications is no small feat. Automotive OEMs must manage up to 150 electronic control units (ECUs) and thousands of software components designed to work both independently yet in harmony. Modern vehicles introduce even more complexity with features like rear seat gaming and advanced entertainment systems powered by generative AI. To meet these demands, automotive software developers must adopt new strategies for rapid software development cycles, preparing for next-generation hardware platforms. By using cloud-based development environments with innovative hardware, OEMs can improve adaptability and scalability across the entire vehicle development lifecycle.

Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment delivers functional and performance parity in the cloud

Intel’s System on Chips (SoCs) are embedded in over 50 million vehicles worldwide, providing the technological backbone for advanced infotainment systems, digital instrument clusters, and other software-defined vehicle functions. Currently, Intel is adopting a ‘whole vehicle’ approach to help address some of the complexities and integration challenges that come with the shift to the new vehicle architectures. This forward-thinking strategy will drive the industry towards a future characterized by greater scalability, where vehicles are increasingly defined by their software capabilities, while also addressing the needs of OEMs that are adopting cloud environments.

Intel and AWS are working together to offer customers a groundbreaking approach to automotive software development. Together they are collaborating on a cloud-based development environment to help address the main pain points of OEMs in shifting automotive software development earlier in the vehicle lifecycle.

By combining scalable AWS infrastructure with Intel’s x86 hardware expertise, Intel’s Automotive Virtual Development Environment (VDE) allows OEMs to achieve environmental parity and have a development environment mirror what’s inside the vehicle. This collaboration is designed to maximize shift-left with an end-to-end approach for software development.

Functional parity is important…

Today’s cloud infrastructure is based on data center hardware that offers high-performance compute in a collaborative, scalable, and flexible way. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors provide an excellent environment for accelerating software development as the instances share the same x86 instructions set architecture (ISA) with Intel® Automotive SDV SoCs.

This inherent parity allows OEMs to test and validate their automotive applications at scale while helping ensure their automotive software behaves consistently across different environments. By integrating in-vehicle operating systems with highly available Amazon EC2 instances powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, OEMs achieve seamless OS parity for their automotive applications (Figure 1). This enables OEMs to start developing earlier and integrate in their Continuous Integration, Testing, and Deployment (CI/CT/CD) pipelines in a cost-effective way.

Figure 1- Functional parity with Intel Automotive Virtual Development EnvironmentFigure 1- Functional parity with Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment

But performance parity is needed

While achieving functional parity is a good starting point – it helps OEMs access development and testing environments at scale – there is a need to deliver even more to address performance parity. The ideal software development environment would provide a continuum to seamlessly move from functional to performance testing within the same development environment. So, why just get functional parity when OEMs can also achieve performance parity?

Typically, in-vehicle SoCs (a.k.a., in-vehicle HPC or central compute) contain integrated graphics processing units (GPUs), Neural Processing Units (NPUs), and Digital Signal Processing Units (DSPs), and other I/Os, which are not found in data center processors (Figure 2). This mismatch leads to challenges in achieving true environmental parity because of inaccurate performance indication. While both virtualized solutions and virtual ECU/SoC models attempt to bridge the hardware gap, they add complexity, require integration efforts, and still won’t give OEMs a good indication on the performance of their software.

Figure 2- Data center HPC hardware architecture vs in-vehicle HPC hardware architectureFigure 2- Data center HPC hardware architecture vs in-vehicle HPC hardware architecture

Intel is bringing Intel® Automotive SDV SoCs (Figure 3) closer to AWS to deliver environmental parity, together providing a solution to reach end targets at the edge that allow for testing and validation of software performance in advance of the automotive hardware.

Figure 3Figure 3- Performance parity with Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment

Through various proof-of-concepts, AWS and Intel have demonstrated the capability to more efficiently develop automotive applications using the right hardware, allowing OEMs to choose between a functional development environment and a performance development environment according to their needs (Figure 4).

With this setup, OEMs gain easy access to hardware that provides a superior development platform, reducing the need to install and maintain expensive equipment. This collaboration fosters more innovative, reliable, and efficient automotive solutions, helping OEMs stay ahead in the rapidly evolving automotive industry.

Figure 4Figure 4- Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment on AWS

Conclusion

By working together Intel and AWS are delivering a new approach that helps ensure both performance and functional parity, addressing the needs of early software development in the automotive sector.

By enabling access to Intel® Automotive SDV SoCs with the ability to match the performance characteristics (e.g., CPU/GPU frequency, cache size) of OEMs in-vehicle platform, Intel and AWS now offer close to identical hardware parity. This will help reduce the time and cost of software development for OEMs by taking advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud. Explore and discuss how the Intel Automotive Virtual Development Environment can help OEMs, Tier1s, and ISVs on their shift-left software journey! Get started and experience a VDE sneak peek at the Santa Clara AWS Prototyping and Innovation Lab. Reach out at ExploreVDE@intel.com.

Chris Cormack

Chris Cormack

Chris Cormack is a Principal Engineer and the Chief Software Architect for the Intel Automotive Business Unit. Chris is responsible for Intel Automotive’s overall software vision, architecture, and technical strategy. Over the last 10 years, he has largely focused on heavily consolidated system architectures, primarily in automotive and embedded markets. Outside of work, he enjoys travelling with his family and playing tennis.

Jeremy Dahan

Jeremy Dahan

Jeremy Dahan is an Automotive Compute Sr Tech GTM Specialist at Amazon Web Services. He’s helping customers / partners to tackle the most challenging problems related to automotive software leveraging cloud capabilities. He has over a decade of experience in the automotive industry specifically in embedded software and more recently in the cloud. When not building things on AWS, he’s tinkering with car/IoT sensors.

Karen Truitt

Karen Truitt

Karen Truitt is the Sr. Director of Intel Automotive, Incubation Strategy. She is part of the CTO office and is responsible for exploring new business opportunities and strategic partnerships to accelerate Intel’s Automotive Strategy. With over 20 years in tech, her experiences have been focused on areas of transformation and delivering value to customers. Motto: Life is too short to drink bad wine.

Maria Elli

Maria Elli

Maria Elli is the Lead Data Scientist at the Intel Automotive CTO Office. She is responsible for the ideation and incubation of new solutions for Intel Automotive customers. For the past 7 years, she has focused on standardization efforts for automated driving safety and technical solutions for consumer vehicles. She loves traveling and when she does, she always carries a film camera.

Stefano Marzani

Stefano Marzani

Stefano is focused on helping to solve the biggest challenges in the automotive industry. His current focus is helping the automotive industry transition to software-defined vehicles, enabling autonomous functionalities, connected services, and AI-powered delightful user experiences. Stefano’s technical expertise lies in IoT, Machine Learning, Vehicle Architecture, HMI, and Automotive Software Development & Tooling.