Chinese startup Horizon Robotics has started mass production of the country's first automotive-grade artificial intelligence chip, which is expected to take on those from the Israeli giant Mobileye in the global autonomous driving market.

The chip, called Journey 2, is built based on Horizon's proprietary Brain Processing Unit 2.0 processor architecture and has a computing performance of more than 4 tera operations per second at a typical power consumption of only 2 watt, said the four-year old company.

Horizon said the chip is capable of handling a number of tasks, like accurately recognizing and detecting different objects in real time with very low latency.

The chip can thus be applied in various intelligent driving scenarios, such as visual perception for autonomous driving, vision-based mapping & localization and visual advanced driver assistance functions.

It can also power applications like voice recognition, eye tracking and gesture identification, said the company.

Zhang Yufeng, vice-president of Horizon, said the company has received orders from five countries for the chip and in two years vehicles sporting its chip will total 1 million.

Its customers including international giants including Audi and Bosch but also Chinese companies ranging from SAIC to GAC.

Zhang said the first model to sport the chip will hit the market earlier next year. "We are based in China and thus have the advantage of better cooperation with Chinese carmakers."

Following the Journey 2, Horizon will launch the BPU 3.0-based Journey 3 chip in 2020, which is expected to outperform chips from Mobileye, which is by far a popular choice for vehicle makers.

The company will also unveil the updated Matrix computing platform for autonomous driving in 2020. It is expected to have a 192 tera operations per second.

The Matrix has been serving over 1,000 Level 4 autonomous vehicles. Horizon said it has become a popular platform in the global driving market and the number of vehicles using the platform could reach 10,000 within two or three years.