NVIDIA is shifting its autonomous car platform DRIVE over to its brand new Ampere architecture.
The capabilities of DRIVE are expanding significantly. DRIVE is no longer just an entry-level ADAS (Advanced driver-assistance systems) solution and can now support complete Level 5 autonomous driving like robotaxis.
DRIVE will now use NVIDIA’s Ampere GPUs which promise to be “the company’s largest leap in performance to date within its eight generations of GPUs,” and claim to boost AI performance by up to 20x. The first GPU based on the Ampere architecture, the A100, was announced during this week’s virtual GTC event.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said
“NVIDIA A100 GPU is a 20x AI performance leap and an end-to-end machine learning accelerator — from data analytics to training to inference. For the first time, scale-up and scale-out workloads can be accelerated on one platform.”
The expanded DRIVE range now starts with an NCAP 5-star ADAS system and spans to a DRIVE AGX Pegasus robotaxi platform.
By combining two Ampere GPUs and two Orin SoCs, the DRIVE AGX Pegasus robotaxi platform achieves 2,000 trillion operations per second – over 6x the performance of the previous platform.
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There’s clearly a lot to be excited about here, particularly if you work in scientific computing or AI, but there are also some fascinating developments that should influence Nvidia’s future consumer graphics cards too. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait too much longer to see Ampere GPUs for gaming – after all, next-gen’s coming.