Marelli: a new artificial intelligence-based control unit for motorsport

Marelli is launching a new artificial intelligence-based control unit suitable for all types of powertrains (conventional and electric) at the Professional MotorSport World Expo in Cologne, Germany, scheduled for 13-14 November 2024.

The Italian company exploits the potential of artificial intelligence for engine and vehicle control in motorsport applications. Vehicle Control Units (Vcu) are high-performance control units that integrate several functions in a single device: engine and chassis control, data acquisition, gateway for cloud and telemetry, and in-vehicle networking.The new Vec_480 redefines the standard for traditional ECUs in motorsport, offering advanced performance, efficiency, reliability, computing power and connectivity. Compared to the current Vcu, real-time computing performance is 2.5 times higher; bandwidth between processors has increased tenfold, as has RAM memory, providing much greater flexibility and reliability for all vital vehicle control strategies.

The new artificial intelligence-based control unit is designed to handle the increasing complexity of 'neural based' algorithms in real time, thanks to an advanced AI accelerator (Npu - Neural Processing Unit) available with a computing capacity of up to 26 Tops (Tera Operations per Second).