Nvidia has introduced Nvidia Drive AGX Orin, a software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots.
The platform is powered by a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Orin, which consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of R&D investment.
The Orin SoC integrates Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores, as well as new deep learning and computer vision accelerators that, in aggregate, deliver 200 trillion operations per second – nearly 7 times the performance of Nvidia’s previous generation Xavier SoC.
Orin is reportedly designed to handle the “large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots”, while achieving systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D.
Built as a software-defined platform, Drive AGX Orin has been developed to enable architecturally compatible platforms that scale from a Level 2 to full self-driving Level 5 vehicle, enabling OEMs to develop large-scale and complex families of software products.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said: “Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society’s greatest computing challenge.
“The amount of investment required to deliver autonomous vehicles has grown exponentially, and the complexity of the task requires a scalable, programmable, software-defined AI platform like Orin.”
The Nvidia Drive AGX Orin family will include a range of configurations based on a single architecture, targeting carmakers’ 2022 production timelines.
