NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a series of significant automotive announcements during his keynote address at GTC China, including:
- The introduction of NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, the world’s highest performance, most advanced software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots.
- The open access of NVIDIA deep neural networks and advanced learning tools for AV development on the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry
- DiDi, Karma and Xpeng are teaming with NVIDIA for autonomous driving and cloud computing .
NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin™, a highly advanced software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots.
The platform is powered by a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Orin, which consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of R&D investment. 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.
Built as a software-defined platform, DRIVE AGX Orin is developed to enable architecturally compatible platforms that scale from a Level 2 to full self-driving Level 5 vehicle, enabling OEMs to develop large-scale and complex families of software products. Since both Orin and Xavier are programmable through open CUDA and TensorRT APIs and libraries, developers can leverage their investments across multiple product generations.
NVIDIA today announced that it will provide the transportation industry with access to its NVIDIA DRIVE™ deep neural networks (DNNs) for autonomous vehicle development on the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry.
NVIDIA DRIVE has become a de facto standard for AV development, used broadly by automakers, truck manufacturers, robotaxi companies, software companies and universities. Now, NVIDIA is providing access of its pre-trained AI models and training code to AV developers. Using a suite of NVIDIA AI tools, the ecosystem can freely extend and customize the models to increase the robustness and capabilities of their self-driving systems.
AI is central to the development of safe, self-driving cars — allowing them to perceive and react in real time to their surroundings for intelligent operation. At its core are dozens of DNNs that tackle redundant and diverse tasks, ensuring accurate perception, localization and path planning.
Karma Drives with AGX
Southern California-based automaker and high-tech incubator Karma Group today announced during the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in China that it will leverage the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier and Pegasus AI computing platforms for future autonomous electric vehicle capabilities.
DiDi & NVIDIA
DiDi will use NVIDIA® GPUs in the data center for training machine learning algorithms and NVIDIA DRIVE™ for inference on its Level 4 autonomous driving vehicles. In August, DiDi upgraded its autonomous driving unit into an independent company and began a wide range of collaborations with industry partners.
As part of the centralized AI processing of DiDi’s autonomous vehicles, NVIDIA DRIVE enables data to be fused from all types of sensors (cameras, lidar, radar, etc.) using numerous deep neural networks (DNNs) to understand the 360-degree environment surrounding the car and plan a safe path forward.
To train these DNNs, DiDi will use NVIDIA GPU data center servers. For cloud computing, DiDi will also build an AI infrastructure and launch virtual GPU (vGPU) cloud servers for computing, rendering and gaming.
DiDi Cloud will adopt a new vGPU license mode to provide users with better experiences, richer application scenarios and more efficient, flexible GPU cloud computing services. Currently, DiDi Cloud is collaborating with industry partners including NVIDIA to provide services in transportation, AI, graphics rendering, video games and education.
Delivering 10 billion passenger trips per year, DiDi is working toward the safe, large-scale application of autonomous vehicles.
Xpeng Motors will prioritize its end-to-end autonomous driving R&D, introducing Level 3 autonomy in production models in 2020, said Dr. Xinzhou Wu, Vice President of Xpeng’s Autonomous Driving at NVIDIA GTC China 2019 in Suzhou today. Dr. Wu provided details of the autonomous driving architecture of the upcoming P7 intelligent sedan — also on show at GTC China 2019 — which is the first production vehicle to feature the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC) autonomous driving platform