NVIDIA unveiled a host of new products at its GTC keynote today, including a series of major announcements regarding the company’s peripheral AI-related ambitions. One such major development now aims to bring autonomous mobility one giant step closer to becoming a reality. To wit, NVIDIA has now unveiled the latest iteration of its Autonomous Vehicle (AV) System-on-a-Chip (SoC), dubbed the DRIVE Thor. As a successor to the Orin chip, the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor superchip will offer a whopping 2,000 teraflops of computing power – capable of processing 254 trillion operations per second – and unify diverse functionalities, including digital cluster, infotainment, parking, and assisted driving. Moreover, the raw computing power of the Thor chip can be divided between autonomous driving and the in-cabin AI and infotainment system, as per the discretion of the auto manufacturers. Moreover, NVIDIA has integrated Hopper’s transformer engine within the DRIVE Thor, allowing superior deep neural network accuracy. As a refresher, transformer networks process video data as a single perception frame, allowing the computing platform to process more data over time. In other news, NVIDIA has now imbued its DRIVE Sim with AI functionalities that allow the neural reconstruction engine to turn recorded video into a simulation. Finally, NVIDIA has also unveiled the DRIVE Concierge, a personalized in-cabin infotainment system for each passenger. In related developments, the Chinese EV manufacturer ZEEKR will be the first customer for the NVIDIA Thor superchip. Meanwhile, the company’s current-gen SoC Orin also continues to attract new customers, with XPeng and QCraft having announced their intention to deploy the SoC on their new models. At the time of writing, NVIDIA shares are down a little over 1 percent as the market awaits the latest interest rate decision by the Federal Reserve’s FOMC. Year to date, the stock is now down around 56 percent.
You can watch the pertinent section of NVIDIA’s Keynote address in the YouTube video above.
