Technology company Nvidia has announced a new supercomputer that is equipped with artificial intelligence. The supercomputer called the "Nvidia Drive PX 2" was designed specifically for self-driving cars. With a size comparable to a lunchbox, its processing power is equal to "100 MacBook Pros," a report from Gamespot said.
According to the report, details of Nvidia's new supercomputer were announced officially by the company CEO Jen-Hsun through a press conference during this year's CES 2016. He emphasized that the piece of technology embedded in the Nvidia Drive PX 2 will enable future cars to drive independently.
"The Drive PX 2 is powered by Nvidia GPUs and has 360-degree situational awareness around the car. It is capable of processing the inputs of 12 video cameras, as well as lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. The unit features water-cooling, to enable operation in severe conditions. The software which facilitates the processing is called Nvidia DriveWorks, which features a suite of software tools that focus on the testing and development of autonomous vehicles. Nvidia also announced that Volvo would be the first car company to deploy several hundred cars with Drive PX 2 to start developing their self-driving capabilities," the report said.
It was said that the company's Drive PX 2 development engine is expected to arrive in the market by fourth quarter of 2016. However, the company stressed that early selected development partners will be able to physically drive the model car by the second quarter of the same year.
"Nvidia is also working with Audi to test its systems, to the point where its system was able to read German road signs "better than a human can." Daimler, BMW, and Ford are using the system to develop their self-driving cars, as well. Make sense? Probably not, but that's okay. The point is that Nvidia believes that a properly-designed self driving car needs to have a ton of processing power so that it can handle all the sensors, controls, and learning it needs to be fully autonomous (instead of, say, being dependent on connectivity to the cloud)," The Verge said.