Automotive Technology a Focus at Nvidia’s GTC Event

by Jeffrey Burt

Nvidia’s Huang holds up a Drive PX development board during his keynote address at GTC. The technology will augment current advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS), which among other things can autonomously apply brakes to avoid a collision. (Photo courtesy of Nvidia)

The development board, aimed at automakers and researchers working on self-driving cars, is armed with two Tegra X1 GPUs that can offer up to 2.3 teraflops of compute power. It will be available in May for $10,000.

On the exhibit floor, Nvidia officials hooked up the Drive PX to a demo vehicle. Among the features is the ability to hook up to 12 cameras into the board, which can be seen in the lower left part of the board.

Shown here are the video data streams that are captured by the 12 cameras connected to the Drive PX board.

The Drive CX platform, already part of Nvidia’s Automotive business unit, helps drive such capabilities in cars as 3D navigation, infotainment, digital instrument clusters and natural speech processing.

Elon Musk, right, talks with Huang about his expectations for autonomous cars. Among them are that it will be illegal for humans to drive cars because it will be deemed to unsafe and that most issues around self-driving cars have been solved. It’s now just a matter of the technology catching up. (Photo courtesy of Nvidia)

Audi is one of a growing number of automakers that are taking part in the race for autonomous cars. Like others on display at GTC, this Audi uses Nvidia GPU technology for its in-console display.

This Renovo Coupe uses the Drive CX platform for its infotainment and digital display.

Here’s a view of the dashboard and infotainment console in the Renovo Coupe.

The Tesla Model S P85D, one of the company’s electric cars, also uses Nvidia technology in the dashboards and was put on display at GTC.

This Lamborghini Aventador also is powered by Nvidia’s GPU technology.

This i8 from BMW—which is another car maker researching autonomous vehicles—takes advantage of Nvidia’s technology as well.

Also on the exhibit floor was the Strati from Local Motors, an electric-powered 3D printed car. Like its more contemporary counterparts, the Strati also uses Nvidia technology.