Nvidia wants to be the main brains of your self-driving cars. The AI chip of the company is all set to arrive in cars in 2025. This is so as Nvidia stated at its GTC event to showcase its GPU technology.
Nvidia Wants To Be the Main Brains of Your Self-Driving Cars
Chip-making company Nvidia on Tuesday revealed a new processor known as Drive Thor, one that the company expects will power the revolution of the autonomous vehicle.
Thor processors are expected to arrive in 2024 for cars that will be hitting the roads in 2025 kicking things off with Chinese carmaker Zeekr’s 001 EV, said Danny Shapiro, the vice president of Nvidia’s automotive work. You should also know that they are based on the new Hopper graphics processing unit of Nvidia in order to handle better the artificial intelligence software that is very important and key to self-driving cars.
The Vice President of Nvidia’s Automotive Works take on the Recent Development
“It absolutely will scale up to full autonomy,” Shapiro cited, referring to level 4 or level 5 self-driving abilities, in which cars can easily pilot themselves without the presence of human occupants or even without them paying any sort of attention to things.
Nvidia Previously Planned a Chip Known as Atlan For 2024
Nvidia had already planned a chip known as Atlan for 2024 but it, however, canceled it in favor of Thor, which is set to handle AI software at 2 quadrillion operations per second which is twice the speed that was planned for Atlan and eight times that of its current Orin processor.
The Thor chip incorporates one key Hopper feature which is the ability for it to accelerate a powerful AI technique known as transformers. Nvidia also expects lower-end variations of Thor for the less revolutionary driver-assist technologies such as lane keeping and automatic emergency braking.
The Automotive Processor Market Keeps Expanding With Lots of Demand
The automotive processor market is big and it’s getting bigger as carmakers demand more and more processors and other semiconductor chips for driver assistance, infotainment, and the electronic control units that help to oversee everything ranging from engine combustion to GPS navigation. It might also interest you to know that each Porsche Taycan has 8,000 semiconductor elements.
Chip designers at the moment are cashing in on the new market. Nvidia for one has $11 billion in automotive chip orders and another top rival in the industry, Qualcomm has $19 billion in automotive orders in the pipeline
