NVIDIA wants its supercomputers to power future smart cars

Don’t let the Consumer Electronics Show fool you, despite its name, it’s as much about the automotive industry as it is about the technology industry. Never has this been more true than now, because with things like autonomous vehicles and smart cars becoming more popular, the automotive and technology industries have started to intersect. NVIDIA is one of the many companies looking to capitalize on this intersection, but rather than focusing on the vehicles themselves, or the software that powers them, NVIDIA is developing the hardware that will provide the vehicles of the future with the immense processing power they’ll need to be autonomous and/or smart. The company revealed the most-recent product of this effort at its CES 2016 press event last night, which it calls the DRIVE PX 2.

NVIDIA today shifted its autonomous-driving leadership into high gear. At a press event kicking off CES 2016, we unveiled artificial-intelligence technology that will let cars sense the world around them and pilot a safe route forward. Dressed in his trademark black leather jacket, speaking to a crowd of some 400 automakers, media and analysts, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed DRIVE PX 2, an automotive supercomputing platform that processes 24 trillion deep learning operations a second. That’s 10 times the performance of the first-generation DRIVE PX, now being used by more than 50 companies in the automotive world. The new DRIVE PX 2 delivers 8 teraflops of processing power. It has the processing power of 150 MacBook Pros. And it’s the size of a lunchbox in contrast to earlier autonomous-driving technology being used today, which takes up the entire trunk of a mid-sized sedan. “Self-driving cars will revolutionize society,” Huang said at the beginning of his talk. “And NVIDIA’s vision is to enable them.” Huang announced that Volvo – known worldwide for safety and reliability – will be the first automaker to deploy DRIVE PX 2. In the world’s first public trial of autonomous driving, the Swedish automaker next year will lease 100 XC90 luxury SUVs outfitted with DRIVE PX 2 technology. The technology will help the vehicles drive autonomously around Volvo’s hometown of Gothenburg, and semi-autonomously elsewhere. DRIVE PX 2 has the power to harness a host of sensors to get a 360 degree view of the environment around the car. “The rear-view mirror is history,” Jen-Hsun said.