The competition is reflected in the partnership being announced on Tuesday, in which Intel will provide specialized computer chips to Delphi, an auto supplier, and Mobileye, an Israeli company that specializes in vision systems that have been used in some of the autonomous-driving systems made by Tesla Motors.

Within about two years, Delphi and Mobileye hope to offer automakers a system that can give less expensive cars and trucks the intelligence to drive themselves. At the center will be a package of Mobileye and Intel chips capable of computing about 20 trillion mathematical operations a second, Glen DeVos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering and services, said in an interview on Monday.

A later version of the system, he said, will aim to have two to three times that processing power.

“To be able to do all the computation you need for a fully automated vehicle, you can almost never have too much processing power,” he said.

An Intel spokeswoman confirmed the partnership. She said Delphi and Mobileye would begin using the Core i7 Intel chip, and later would use a more powerful and unnamed processor to be unveiled in a few weeks.

The partnership is the latest by Intel in its bid to muscle into the rapidly expanding automotive chip business. Nvidia, Qualcomm and a few other companies are ahead of Intel, which once dominated the personal computer business but has struggled to duplicate that success in other areas, including mobile devices and automobiles.