China's First Automotive-Grade Multi-Domain Fusion Chip "Hongqi 1" Debuts

Recently, China's first domestically developed automotive-grade, advanced-process multi-domain fusion chip, the "Hongqi 1," has been successfully developed. The chip is a joint effort by China FAW and several local tech companies. It achieves hardware-level integration of five major functional domains — including intelligent driving, cockpit infotainment, and body control — marking a critical step forward for China in the field of high-end automotive central compute chips.

In traditional automotive electronic architectures, systems such as the cockpit, driving, and body are often controlled by separate chips, leading to frequent cross-domain data transfers that place heavy demands on vehicle storage bandwidth and real-time responsiveness. The "Hongqi 1" adopts a single-chip multi-domain fusion design, unifying originally scattered computing power and data streams. This significantly reduces cross-domain communication latency while providing a more predictable access pattern for the onboard storage subsystem. According to reports, the chip's logic computing capability is 21.7% higher than that of mainstream domain-fusion chips in the industry (such as the SA8775), while its image processing capability is 15.4% higher. These improvements enable efficient support for high-load scenarios such as "one chip, multiple screens, and multiple parallel operating systems" — for example, simultaneously driving the instrument cluster, center console, co-driver display, and rear-seat entertainment screens while smoothly running several independent OS environments.

From a data storage perspective, multi-domain fusion means that massive amounts of sensory data (from cameras, radar, vehicle body status, etc.) and cockpit multimedia data must be processed and exchanged in real time within the same chip. This imposes higher demands on on-chip cache, memory bandwidth, and external storage interfaces. Technical sources indicate that the "Hongqi 1" has been specifically optimized in its storage subsystem, supporting high-bandwidth, low-latency access paths, thereby reserving ample compute and I/O headroom for future high-level intelligent driving data logging and immersive cockpit experiences.

A China FAW representative stated that the birth of the "Hongqi 1" not only fills a domestic gap in automotive-grade multi-domain fusion chips but will also drive full-chain innovation ranging from chip design and foundational software to storage solutions and vehicle architecture. It is reported that the chip is expected to be first deployed in Hongqi brand's next-generation high-end new energy vehicles, helping to achieve safer and smarter "cockpit-driving integration."