NVidia

Jaguar Land Rover is partnering with NVIDIA to use their DRIVE Hyperion 8 platform for future vehicles. NVIDIA’s system will power autonomous and driver assistance systems and will render visualization of the vehicle’s environment.

NVIDIA has unveiled what they call the “world’s most advanced processor” for use in autonomous vehicles and robots. The new NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin chip can perform 200 trillion operations per second, which is almost seven times as many as NVIDIA’s previous Xavier chip (30 trillion operations) and more than Tesla’s FSD Computer (144 trillion).

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NVIDIA, formerly a supplier of Tesla Autopilot hardware, is giving the nod to Tesla for ‘raising the bar’ when it comes to self-driving with their announcements yesterday. However, they also dispute some of the claims made by the automaker about its new FSD computer.

But the chipmaker is missing an important point.

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Nvidia has been positioning itself as a leading computing power supplier for autonomous driving. Tesla deployed Nvidia’s Drive PX2 computers in its vehicles last year and claimed it could eventually enable fully autonomous driving (level 5) – becoming the first to include it in production cars.

But the automaker and chipmaker didn’t agree on the computing power needed to enable fully self-driving capability.

Now Nvidia unveils a new supercomputer that it believes will enable level 5 autonomous driving.

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In the past, we have extensively covered the fact that Tesla has been equipping all its vehicles produced since October 2016 with a very powerful computer in order to eventually enable fully self-driving capability.

While Nvidia confirmed that the computer in question is based on its Drive PX2 platform for autonomous driving, they offer several variations of the product and we never knew which one for sure until now.

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NVIDIA, a leading GPU maker, has been emerging as an important computing power supplier for the automotive industry’s transition to autonomous driving. Over the past two decades, the computing power in the passenger cars has increased significantly, but it’s nothing compared to how it will have to increase over the next decade in order for cars to drive themselves.

Toyota has become today the latest automaker to team up with NVIDIA in order to accelerate their autonomous vehicle program.

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NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 is the onboard supercomputer that is installed in all-new Tesla vehicles since October 2016 and that powers the automaker’s second generation Autopilot with the ‘Tesla Vision’ image processing technology.

We had to take Tesla at their words that the high-tech piece of equipment was in the vehicle until now. An owner removed the panels of the new car and we got our first look at the system this week.

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In the same week that the California Department of Motor Vehicles granted a permit to NVIDIA to start testing self-driving cars in the state, it was reported that Tesla, which uses NVIDIA’s chips to power the latest version of its Autopilot, signed a contract with Samsung Electronics to build an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) system for future self-driving applications.

While NVIDIA has been positioning itself as a supplier of the computing power behind self-driving systems, it wasn’t believed to have ambitions to build entire systems with sensors and controls. While it could still be the case, it would seem that Tesla and NVIDIA are both increasingly encroaching on each others’ area of expertise.

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NVIDIA reported its financial results for the last quarter yesterday and surprised Wall Street. The chip maker, which is now becoming an “AI company” according to its leadership, reported revenue of $2 billion on expectations of $1.7 billion and they also surpassed earnings expectations by a similar margin.

On a conference call with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang following the results, analysts were particularly interested in the company’s push in AI and the automotive industry, especially since Tesla’s started delivering every single one of its vehicles with NVIDIA’s Drive PX2 supercomputer.

Huang offered some very interesting insights into how he sees Tesla’s self-driving program playing out.

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We reported in exclusivity earlier this month that Tesla was going with Nvidia hardware to power its imagine processing platform called ‘Tesla Vision’, but we couldn’t pinpoint which product Tesla was going to use exactly. While we discussed the possibility of using Nvidia’s new Drive PX2 AI computing platform for self-driving cars, we also noted that the product is fairly new and expensive to be included in all new Tesla cars coming off the line.

We thought the theory was confirmed when Tesla CEO Elon Musk said this week that the automaker ended up choosing the ‘Nvidia Titan GPU’, an off-the-shelves but powerful GPU card, to power ‘Tesla Vision’, but as it turns out, Musk misspoke and Nvidia confirmed that the “in-vehicle supercomputer is powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 AI computing platform.”

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NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that he took delivery of a rare Tesla Model X P90D, presumably a ‘Founder Series’ since Signature Model X reservation holders have yet to be assigned a delivery date.

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While it seems near-certain that Google plans a full-scale commercial rollout of its self-driving cars, and that Apple has serious plans for a competing vehicle of its own, neither company is likely to manufacture the cars itself. As a recent opinion piece argued, actually manufacturing a car is massively complex undertaking.

Both Google and Apple will therefore be looking for partners to pull together different elements of the car, and Re/code has put together an interesting look at the most likely candidates. Though the piece is focused on the Apple Car, the analysis applies to Apple, Google and Tesla alike … 

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Tesla’s Model S (or a wrecked one) got the IHS Supply teardown treatment and if you are wondering what makes the car tick, it is a worthy watch/read (PDF). Notably Tesla “really wanted to do things differently and employed virtual controls—rather than physical knobs and buttons—to take over the user experience. This approach required a major investment in big displays and touch panels, similar to the approach Apple took when designing the iPhone and iPad.”

It is no secret the NVidia processor runs the display and the center stack. Other notables:

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