NVIDIA Unveils ‘Highly Advanced’ Processor for Autonomous Vehicles and Robots

Nvidia continues to up the ante in the processor game.

According to a press release, the Santa Clara-based tech giant has introduced a “highly advanced” software platform designed for autonomous vehicles and robots.

The platform, called the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, is powered a new system on a chip called Orin, which Nvidia says “consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of R&D investment.”

Here’s more:

The Orin SoC integrates NVIDIA’s next-generation GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores, as well as new deep learning and computer vision accelerators that, in aggregate, deliver 200 trillion operations per second—nearly 7x the performance of NVIDIA’s previous generation Xavier SoC.

Orin 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.

Orin is capable of scaling from Level 2 to full-fledged, Level 5 self-driving vehicles. Manufacturers would be able to choose a range of configurations for it, and it will be available by 2022.

“Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society’s greatest computing challenge,” said NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang. “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.”

Photo: NVIDIA