Nvidia to equip self-driving cars with water-cooled ‘supercomputer’

“Autonomous cars will bring increased safety, new convenient mobility services and even handsome urban designs – providing a powerful force for a better future”, he added.

NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 learns quickly to address the challenges of everyday driving such as construction zones, erratic drivers, and unexpected road debris.

Computer graphics card maker Nvidia is branching out to self-driving cars, introducing “the world’s most powerful engine for in-vehicle artificial intelligence (AI)” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 4 (January 5, Manila time). “Deep learning also addresses numerous problem areas where traditional computer vision techniques are insufficient – such as poor weather conditions like rain, snow and fog, and hard lighting conditions like sunrise, sunset and extreme darkness”, Nvidia explained in the official announcement.

The PX 2 draws its power from two next-gen Tegra processors and a Pascal-based GPU, whose combined processing power can easily control 12 video cameras and a bunch of sensors in real-time to assist self-driving cars in making judicious decisions on the move. Jen-Hsun claimed the liquid cooling was necessary for this version of the Drive PX 2 to ensure reliable operation in the wide variety of environmental conditions an automobile is likely to encounter.

The company has also announced NVIDIA DriveWorks which is essentially a set of tools that aid in the testing and development of the self-driving vehicles.

NVIDIA ultimate goal is to create an end to end platform for deep learning and autonomous driving, that incorporates a deep learning platform for training, deep neural networks, and in-car AI. The ability to rapidly train deep neural networks on vast amounts of data is critical. Nvidia calls this mesh of self-improving “brains” the “Drivenet”. The trained neural net model runs on NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 within the vehicle.

It’s clear that NVIDIA recognizes the potential the auto market has once it makes the switch to self-driving cars and the company’s efforts are positioning it in such a way as to take advantage of this coming shift. Early access to development hardware is expected to be towards the middle of the year with general availability of final hardware in Q4 2016.