Nvidia Unveils Supercomputer for Self-Driving Cars at CES 2016

From the cheat code enabled cars running on the streets of Los Santos, to now consumer cars on the streets of Delhi, American graphic card maker Nvidia aims to use its expertise in making GPUs to bring to life a ‘supercomputer’ which, powered by artificial intelligence, will enable cars to drive on streets all by themselves!

This computer, which will be the size of a ‘lunchbox’, is slated to have 12 CPU cores that will support a combined eight teraflops,and 24 deep learning tera operations per second. This roughly translates to a horsepower equivalent to almost 150 MacBook Pros!  This mighty processing unit will be water cooled to ensure this beast on wheels gets through those difficult days out in the sun without breaking a sweat.

The Drive PX2, as Nvidia likes to call it, with all its power can handle inputs from 12 different cameras at a time, and is capable of 360- Degree situational awareness at all times. Bullying its way on the back of its processing might, it will also process inputs from lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

‘Nvidia Driveworks’ is the firmware suit which will include software tools that will interact with the  hardware at hand. A reference platform has already been created by the american chip maker, codenamed “Nvidia Drivenet”, to test its own driverless cars. The software in itself is a thing of sheer beauty, and has multiple layers to it  so that “it can train itself to learn and perceive things out in the world”

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that “it took just a few months for the network to recognize objects in real time.” It’s not new, but Nvidia says that it’s made huge strides in recent months. In one impressive demo, Nvidia showed how it was able to detect cars even in very snowy conditions. Huang further revealed that Volvo would be the first of several other car companies to partner with Nvidia in taking the Drive PX2 project forward.

The development suit for the Drive PX2 will be “generally available” sometime late 2016. Early access development partners will be able to get their hands on it midway through the year

Nvidia with the Drive PX2, and its accompanying software suite looks confident of having a real game changer at hand, and the specs along with the initial trials of the system also give credibility to its claims.

Having altered virtual reality through consoles, and PCs for a lot of us growing up at the turn of the century, we at iGyaan would wish Nvidia all the luck in its efforts to not only take the concept of driver-less cars forward, but revolutionise it, bridging the gap between real life, and sci-fi tales, like it once did with it’s ‘Powered by Nvidia’ games.