Nvidia announces processor for self-driving cars at CES

If you're a gamer or graphics designer, you know Nvidia makes high performance graphics cards. At CES this year they announced their new processor that has little to do with gaming, but everything to do with image processing – and self-driving cars.

They announced their new Nvidia Drive PX2 – it's a fluid-cooled 12 core cluster with four GPU's that runs at 8 teraflops (8 trillion floating point operations per session – equivalent to a bunch of MacBook Pros.)

Why so much horsepower? They use it to run a high-performance deep-learning network – it's a technology that's used for machines to learn; in this case, it's learning about how to recognize objects and situations from information passed to it from cameras, lidar, radar and other sensors. With all this performance, deep-learning tasks that might have taken weeks to learn can now be done in a day.

They're working on a 3D display of what the machine "sees" – basically to provide riders confidence that it can see and react to the real world much faster than they could.

Volvo will be implementing the Nvidia platform first. Mercedez-Benz, Daimler and Audi are testing this hardware in their own test vehicles as well.

For more info see the Nvidia Blog.

Here's a video from CES.