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January 9, 2018 | Dan Feinberg, FeinLine Associates, Inc.Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The largest industry globally involves moving people, and gaming is now the largest sport. NVIDIA is heavily involved and leading the way in these segments.
Speaking to the large crowd, Huang announced that the company is now working with over 320 partners on autonomous vehicles, including new agreements with key global players. At the focal point of these collaborations is the new Xavier autonomous machine processor This is the most complex and powerful SoC ever created. Xavier will be available to select partners over the next few months, about a year after it was first announced.
“The complexity of future cars is incredible. It begins with Xavier, which can do deep learning, computer vision and high-performance computing at highly efficient levels,” said Huang, speaking to the full house of press, partners and professionals from around the automotive and consumer electronics industries.
The company announced a partnership with Volkswagen, and has teamed with the ISP Baidu and automotive supplier ZF to build an autonomous vehicle platform in China. NVIDIA also inked agreements with ride-sharing service Uber, and Aurora, a US startup led by some of the leading names in autonomous driving.
The new NVIDIA devices put truly massive computer power on the road. The Volta will process 125 teraflops; the hand-sized supercomputer Titan V can outproduce 20 racks of standard computers.
As Huang told the crowd, “This is more computing power than I can describe here.”
Last year’s headline unit, the Drive PX2, which powered a driverless vehicle from the NVIDIA HQ in central California to CES in Las Vegas, has been soundly beaten by the new, smaller Xavier, which draws half the power. It seems like the power of these devices is expanding at an exponential level. Has NVIDIA created a 21st century Moore’s law?
This is the result of $2 billion in R&D, Huang explained.
“Now, we’ve built PCs, laptops, game consoles, supercomputers, and I can tell you, without exception, building a computer for autonomous vehicles is of a level of complexity the world has never known. This computer is on all the time, monitoring all of the sensors that are coming at it—it can never fail, it can never fail, because lives are at stake,” Huang said. “And it has to make the right decision, running software the world has never known how to write.”
The end of the event focused on the new partnership with Uber as well as the newly announced partnership with Volkswagen, by introducing the VW CEO.
As we left the hall, many of us commented that the event featured so many announcements that we were all weary, and that we were all amazed at the progress announced by NVIDIA in what appears to be a very productive year.
Next, tune in tomorrow for a report on the Panasonic presser as well as the “ShowStoppers Launch It” event, followed by the Day 1 highlights.s
References
Additional Reads:
CES 2018 Showstoppers: Launchit and Press EventCES 2018, Augmented Reality and Much More
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