CES 2015| New Nvidia CPUs Were Presented. It’s Time To Talk About Tomorrow’s Cars
When will anything, anywhere be connected?
In the near future, your journey home may go a bit like this: as you leave your office, an empty car rolls up. Perhaps you summoned it, or maybe this is a regular pickup. On the way home you listen to your favorite music, watch a television show or catch up with the news. There is no traffic or accidents that makes your car slow down. When you arrive home, the car heads off to its parking spot and waits for a call.
It’s no longer an impossible dream! At CES 2015, NVIDIA just introduced NVIDIA DRIVE automotive computers — equipped with powerful capabilities for computer vision, deep learning and advanced cockpit visualization. They are called NVIDIA DRIVE PX and NVIDIA DRIVE CX.
“Mobile supercomputing will be central to tomorrow’s cars. With vast arrays of cameras and displays, cars of the future will see and increasingly understand their surroundings. Whether finding their way back to you from a parking spot or using situational awareness to keep out of harm’s way, future cars will do many amazing, seemingly intelligent things. Advances in computer vision, deep learning and graphics have finally put this dream within reach”, said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and Co-Founder NVIDIA.
The NVIDIA DRIVE PX is purposed for developing autopilot capabilities. The architectural design is based on the Tegra X1 SoC, but add-in one more SoC, giving it a grand total of 2.3 teraflops of computational power–yes, that’s trillions of floating-point operations per second! Instead of using lasers, radar and cameras, NVIDIA’s engineers featured their “Deep Neural Network” onto the DRIVE PX, allowing it to work with 12 cameras and to process up to 1.3 gigapixels per second. Moreover, by using these two things in tandem, the DRIVE PX is able to recognize various objects on the road, ranging from pedestrians, occluded pedestrians, cars, vans, and more. It can also recognize speed cameras and police cars, and a mapping system for your surroundings.
With the NVIDIA DRIVE PX, any car in the future can drive by itself with a range from long distances on highways to city driving. Thanks to an Auto-Valet system, your cars can venture into an unknown parking place and find a spot to park without needing a map of the parking lot.
The second computer is NVIDIA DRIVE CX, which is purposed for creating the most advanced digital cockpit system. It’s a complete solution with hardware and software to enable advanced graphics and computer vision for navigation, infotainment, digital instrument clusters and driver monitoring. It also enables Surround-Vision, which provides an undistorted top-down, 360-degree view of the car in real time — solving the problem of blind spots — and can completely replace a physical mirror with a digital smart mirror. The demos included navigation with 3D maps, dynamic lighting to keep you focused on what’s necessary, ambient occlusion, shadows, and more. NVIDIA also claimed that the car would be able to have multiple profiles, with one for each drive (which has already been featured on Tesla Model S cars for years). The computer is powered by NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture and supports every major OS in the world.
Both NVIDIA DRIVE PC and DRIVE CX platforms include a range of software application modules from NVIDIA or third-party solutions providers and will be available in the second quarter of 2015.
“NVIDIA DRIVE will accelerate the intelligent car revolution by putting the visual computing capabilities of supercomputers at the service of each drive.” — NVIDIA’’s CEO
In the past, more people driving meant more roads, more jams, more death and more fumes. in future, the connected cars could offer mankind the pleasures of the road with less of the pain.
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