Nvidia announces hardware with Tegra X1 socs for self-driving cars

Nvidia has announced that it will launch its Drive PX development hardware, which houses two Tegra X1 sockets, in May. Car manufacturers have to pay 10,000 dollars, or 9441 euros, for the hardware. Drive PX is intended for the construction of self-driving cars.

At CES in January, Nvidia briefly showed the Drive PX hardware, but the company announced at its GPU Technology Conference that the development hardware will be on the market in two months for $10,000. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Drive PX is up to 3,000 times faster than Dave, a platform for the development of self-driving cars developed by Darpa, the research institute of the US Department of Defense.

According to Nvidia, the Drive PX platform can be ‘trained’ through over-the-air updates. The two Tegra X1 socs could provide computing power of up to 2.3 teraflops, enough to simultaneously process images from twelve cameras and sensors, and allow a vehicle to drive autonomously.

Nvidia uses deep learning technology in Drive PX via the so-called Digits SDK. This software uses the GPUs of the Tegra X1 socs for image processing, among other things. Digits could let the software ‘see’ the immediate environment of an autonomous vehicle, so that other algorithms can make decisions based on this information.