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).
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.
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. expand full story
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. expand full story
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. expand full story
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. expand full story
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. expand full story
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.
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.
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. expand full story