The race for autonomy in cars is ubiquitous. Top car brands are working in providing complete autonomous vehicles to their customers and the future with self-driving vehicles is inevitable. Adding the cherry to the cake, Nvidia’s recently announced chip is the latest generation of its DrivePX onboard car computers called Pegasus. The device is 13 times faster than the previous iteration, which has so far been used by the likes of Audi, Tesla, and Volvo to provide semi-autonomous driving capabilities in their vehicles.

Nvidia Pegasus

At the heart of this semiconductor is the mind-boggling technology of Deep Learning. “In the old world, the more powerful your engine, the smoother your ride will be,” Huang said during the announcement. “In the future, the more computational performance you have, the smoother your ride will be.”

Nvidia asserts that the device is only about the size of a license plate. But it has enough power to process data from up to 16 sensors, detect objects, find the car’s place in the world, plan a path, and control the vehicles itself. Oh, and it will also update centrally stored high-definition maps at the same time—all with some resources to spare.

The new system is designed to eventually handle up to 320 trillion operations per second (TOPS), compared to the 24tn of today’s technology. That would give it the power needed to process the masses of data produced by a vehicle’s cameras and other sensors and allow it to drive completely autonomously, Nvidia said. The first systems to be tested next year will have less processing power but will be designed to scale up with the addition of extra chips.

(sources: MitTechReview, NvidiaBlog)