Nvidia announces Drive PX 2, a dual-GPU, dual-SoC chip for cars

[Scorpus]

Nvidia has held its usual keynote address at CES 2016, unveiling a new processing board for cars that packs two ARM-based Tegra SoCs along with two next-generation Pascal GPUs.

The Drive PX 2, as it's known, is the successor to last year's Drive PX, and is designed to facilitate autonomous driving. The idea is that you place the Drive PX 2 in the heart of the car, connect up to 12 cameras, a LIDAR, RADAR and ultrasonic sensors, and use relevant software to create the neural network of a self-driving car.

Nvidia has absolutely loaded the Drive PX 2 with processing power. The two Tegra SoCs pack a total of 12 CPU cores, split between four in-house Denver units and eight ARM Cortex-A57s. On the rear of the board are two discrete GPUs using Nvidia's next-generation Pascal architecture, which, like the Tegra SoCs, are built using a 16nm FinFET process.

When the Drive PX 2 is equipped with appropriate software, Nvidia claims it's good for eight TFLOPS of and 24 "deep learning tera-ops" (DL TOPS) of compute power. The board is designed to consume up to 250 watts of power, and as such, requires liquid cooling to operate.

On the software side, Nvidia has debuted DriveWorks, a set of tools that can be used in conjunction with the Drive PX 2 to detect and identify objects based on the input from sensors, determine where the car is, and plot routes through traffic efficiently. The tools can also be used to accelerate the "development and testing of autonomous vehicles," according to Nvidia.

The first company to use the Drive PX 2 will be Volvo, although over 50 development teams, including other car makers, have already signed on to trial the hardware. Early access to said hardware is expected to come in the middle of this year, with the general availability of hardware in Q4 2016.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/63350-nvidia-announces-drive-px2-self-driving-cars.html

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Although I didn't understand much of what was being said in this article (to do that it would mean I would have to read the article properly instead of just skimming through it) but what I did figure out, I like the sound of.

 

[stewi0001]

How nice for cars now how about Pascal video cards for PCs??? Still waiting for a when and a $ nVidia

 

[Adhmuz]

Why does it feel like people are spending more time and energy making cars that can drive themselves when the solution is to simply educate people better on how to drive their cars and not be hazards on the road. Learning how to drive seems to be the least important part of driving and owning a car, it's far more important to have a car that can drive itself while the tool being the "wheel" can txt and be an otherwise distracted driver/occupant. The more electronics are car has the worse the driver tends to be, although some people are just downright insane and cannot be helped. And then you see children in the backseats and you can't even begin to understand the thought process of these individuals. But hey, autonomous cars will solve this right?

 

[mantissteam]

That was an awesome presentation watched the whole thing was glued to the screen the whole time awesome stuff

 

[Mister_K]

Why does it feel like people are spending more time and energy making cars that can drive themselves when the solution is to simply educate people better on how to drive their cars and not be hazards on the road. Learning how to drive seems to be the least important part of driving and owning a car, it's far more important to have a car that can drive itself while the tool being the "wheel" can txt and be an otherwise distracted driver/occupant. The more electronics are car has the worse the driver tends to be, although some people are just downright insane and cannot be helped. And then you see children in the backseats and you can't even begin to understand the thought process of these individuals. But hey, autonomous cars will solve this right?

Because you will never provide enough education no matter what to prevent all the retarded drives who cause accidents.

Also autonomous driving = luxury, meaning that you can lay back and enjoy your lengthy trip.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

Why does it feel like people are spending more time and energy making cars that can drive themselves when the solution is to simply educate people better on how to drive their cars and not be hazards on the road. Learning how to drive seems to be the least important part of driving and owning a car, it's far more important to have a car that can drive itself while the tool being the "wheel" can txt and be an otherwise distracted driver/occupant. The more electronics are car has the worse the driver tends to be, although some people are just downright insane and cannot be helped. And then you see children in the backseats and you can't even begin to understand the thought process of these individuals. But hey, autonomous cars will solve this right?

No, it won't get people to care for their kids, but it will help prevent accidents. Humans can't react faster than .2 seconds ( in fact, in the olympics in Track and Field, if you react to the starting gun in less than .2 seconds, they give you a false start). Humans can also only focus on a small field of view. We're terribly limited at driving cars.
Imagine no more falling asleep at the wheel, no more drunk driving, no more distracted driving (billboards still cause more accidents than anything else). And because reaction times can be so fast, we could all travel 50 mph bumper to bumper, which would greatly decrease traffic jams.

Kids born today will someday laugh at the thought of driving yourself. Year ago people scoffed at seatbelts. They were seen as a proof that you were a bad driver and wearing one was often an insult to the driver. That mentality has changed... one day people will be amazed we dealt with the risk of driving ourselves.

 

[dividebyzero]

How nice for cars now how about Pascal video cards for PCs??? Still waiting for a when and a $ nVidia

Nvidia traditionally announce GPUs at their annual GPU Technology Conference (4th-7th April).

Why does it feel like people are spending more time and energy making cars that can drive themselves when the solution is to simply educate people better on how to drive their cars and not be hazards on the road.

Why not wish for world peace and equality for all while you're at it? Education and legislation hasn't done a hell of a lot from what I've seen. Statistics tend to show that fatalities drop because vehicle crashes are more survivable and the average number of people per car is lower.
Living in a country that tends to be a holiday destination means that we end up with a season of tourists turning the roads into a cross between National Lampoon's Vacation and Death Race 2000. Amazing that when faced with different road signs, driving on the opposite side of the road, and a high percentage of tight unpaved/two lane blacktop roads that tourists still don't factor an one iota of additional concentration - and that's without including our resident population of braindead and intoxicated teens with a infringe-and-abandon mentality thanks to Japanese imports costing less than a phone, and our wonderful over-60's whose only rule is "I'll do as I damn well please".

Learning how to drive seems to be the least important part of driving and owning a car

That does seem to be the case, and whether you raise the driver eligibility age, make the tests more stringent, or confiscate vehicles and suspend licenses, it still doesn't do a hell of lot to curb the carnage. Hardly surprising when technology moves people to have shorter attention spans, and vehicle relative value at the low end is negligible thanks to cheap finance/discounts/cheap imports.

And then you see children in the backseats and you can't even begin to understand the thought process of these individuals.

Some people here avoid the child in the backseat problem by driving/speeding while having their baby perched on their lap - presumably the effort of taking the child seat from the trunk and installing it were outweighed by the advantage of having the child as a potential substitute airbag.
This kind of thing isn't an isolated case by any means. The mother will probably lose her license but continue to drive without it if history is any indicator.

 

[stewi0001]

Nvidia traditionally announce GPUs at their annual GPU Technology Conference (4th-7th April).