Nvidia Claims Superchip Breakthrough for L5 AV
Gaming software specialist Nvidia is claiming a superchip so fast that it could accelerate the possibility of full Level 5 autonomous driving.
Its Nvidia Drive AGX Orin claims to deliver 200 trillion operations per second, nearly seven time as fast as the company’s previous generation Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC). Powered powered by a SoC called Orin, it consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of research and investment. It integrates the company’s next-generation GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores, as well as new deep learning and computer vision accelerators.
The chip is designed to handle the large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots, while achieving systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D. Since both Orin and Xavier are programmable through open CUDA and TensorRT APIs and libraries, developers can use their investments across multiple product generations.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, said: “Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society’s greatest computing challenge. The amount of investment required to deliver autonomous vehicles has grown exponentially, and the complexity of the task requires a scalable, programmable, software-defined AI platform like Orin.”
The Drive AGX Orin family will include a range of configurations based on a single architecture, targeting automakers’ 2022 production timelines.
— Paul Myles is a seasoned automotive journalist based in London. Follow him on Twitter @Paulmyles_
