NVIDIA today at its CES 2016 event, introduced DRIVE PX 2, world’s first in-car Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer. It utilizes deep learning on NVIDIA’s GPUs for 360-degree situational awareness around the car, to determine precisely where the car is and to compute a safe, comfortable trajectory. It has two next-gen Tegra processors or 12 CPUs cores, capable of 8 teraflops of processing power and 24 teraflops of deep processing operations, two next-gen discrete GPUs, based on the Pascal architecture that deliver up to 24 trillion deep learning operations per second. It also supports liquid cooling.
DRIVE PX 2’s deep learning capabilities enable it to:
- Quickly learn how to address the challenges of everyday driving, such as unexpected road debris, erratic drivers and construction zones.
- Address problem areas where traditional computer vision techniques are insufficient — such as poor weather conditions like rain, snow and fog, and difficult lighting conditions like sunrise, sunset and extreme darkness.
- Process the inputs of 12 video cameras, plus lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors, and fuses them to accurately detect objects, identify them, determine where the car is relative to the world around it, and then calculate its optimal path for safe travel.
- Address the full breadth of autonomous driving algorithms, including sensor fusion, localization and path planning using DRIVE PX 2’s multi-precision GPU architecture capable of up to 8 trillion operations per second.
- Provide high-precision compute when needed for layers of deep learning networks
NVIDIA offers an end-to-end solution, consisting of NVIDIA DIGITS and DRIVE PX 2 for both training a deep neural network, as well as deploying the output of that network in a car. DIGITS is a tool for developing, training and visualizing deep neural networks that can run on any NVIDIA GPU-based system — from PCs and supercomputers to Amazon Web Services and Facebook Big Sur Open Rack-compatible hardware.
“More than 50 automakers have ,tier 1 suppliers, developers and research institutions have adopted NVIDIA’s AI platform for autonomous driving development since the introduction of first-generation DRIVE PX last summer,” said NVIDIA.
NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 development engine will be available for early access development partners in Q2 2016, and will be generally available in Q4 2016. Volvo will use the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 to power 100 Volvo XC90 SUVs that will hit public roads next year.