By Lewis Leong
Self-driving cars are the future, and Nvidia wants in. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced today at the inaugural GPU Technology Conference Europe that the company is developing a simplified supercomputer that can power self-driving cars.
The supercomputer, called Xavier, is a system-on-chip (SoC) design that features both CPU and GPU on a single chip. Nvidia worked hard to shrink the silicon down to minimize space and maximize efficiency.
Xavier features eight Nvidia CPUs and 512 CUDA Cores. It’s those CUDA Cores that allow a specialized programming language to leverage the GPU to perform tasks with greater performance, which are needed for the complex systems in a self-driving car. The chip includes a pair of 8K resolution video processors to help chew threw video feeds from a self-driving car’s camera system.
Nvidia’s Xavier supercomputer can perform 20 trillion operations per second while only consuming 20 watts of power. For reference, Nvidia’s previous self-driving car chip, the DRIVE PX2 used in Volvo’s fleet of self-driving XC90 SUVs, is capable of the same 20 trillion operations per second, but is more than twice as big and requires 250 watts of power.
The future of cars
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Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components