From Forbes:
Graphics chip maker Nvidia announced its latest processor to power its self-driving car ambitions: Parker.
The new mobile processor will serve as the brains behind the company’s autonomous car system, Drive PX 2, first announced at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Drive PX 2 system will feature two Parker processors as well as two of Nvidia latest graphical processing units (GPUs) called Pascal. Nvidia claimed Drive PX 2 will deliver 24 trillion deep learning operations per second. Deep learning, a branch of machine learning, will enable the car to figure out the world around it — like, for example, if that’s a dog or police car with its siren on.
Nvidia said the new Parker processor is 50% to 100% higher performance than competing mobile processors.Here's NVIDIA's blog post on the processor, they seem rather proud.
Nvidia said it has attracted plenty of interest for the hardware so far, with more than 80 car makers, auto suppliers and university research centers working with it. Volvo plans to test out Drive PX 2 in its SUVs next year.
Autonomous vehicles has become a sizable opportunity for Nvidia recently, along with artificial intelligence in general. GPUs have caught on in AI, in part, because of their ability to do “parallel computing,” a technique that involves multiple calculations happening simultaneously. That makes them much faster at running deep learning neural nets than a more generalized processors like those from Intel. Nvidia’s second quarter earnings boasted $119 million in revenue from its auto business, a 68% spike year-over-year....MORE
