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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 18 2019, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the brains-of-the-operation dept.

Nvidia has announced its next chip for self-driving cars years in advance:

First outlined as part of NVIDIA's DRIVE roadmap at GTC 2018, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at GTC China this morning to properly introduce the chip that will be powering the next generation of the DRIVE platform. Officially dubbed the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, the new chip will eventually succeed NVIDIA's currently shipping Xavier SoC, which has been available for about the last year now. In fact, as has been the case with previous NVIDIA DRIVE unveils, NVIDIA is announcing the chip well in advance: the company isn't expecting the chip to be fully ready for automakers until 2022.

What lies beneath Orin then is a lot of hardware, with NVIDIA going into some high-level details on certain parts, but skimming over others. Overall, Orin is a 17 billion transistor chip, almost double the transistor count of Xavier and continuing the trend of very large, very powerful automotive SoCs. NVIDIA is not disclosing the manufacturing process being used at this time, but given their timeframe, some sort of 7nm or 5nm process (or derivative) is pretty much a given. And NVIDIA will definitely need a smaller manufacturing process – to put things in comparison, the company's top-end Turing GPU, TU102, takes up 754mm2 for 18.6B transistors, so Orin will pack in almost as many transistors as one of NVIDIA's best GPUs today.

[...] All told, NVIDIA expects Orin to deliver 7x the 30 INT8 TOPS performance of Xavier, with the combination of the GPU and DLA pushing 200 TOPS. It goes without saying that NVIDIA is still heavily invested in neural networks as the solution to self-driving systems, so they are similarly heavily investing in hardware to execute those neural nets.

[...] Finally, while NVIDIA hasn't disclosed any official figures for power consumption, it's clear that overall power usage is going up relative to Xavier. While Orin is expected to be 7x faster than Xavier, NVIDIA is only claiming it's 3x as power efficient. Assuming NVIDIA is basing all of this on INT8 TOPS as they usually do, then the 1 TOPS/Watt Xavier would be replaced by the 3 TOPS/Watt Orin, putting the 200 TOPS chip at around 65-70 Watts. Which is admittedly still fairly low for a single chip at a company that sells 400 Watt GPUs, but it could add up if NVIDIA builds another multi-processor board like the DRIVE Pegasus.

The design will include 12 ARM "Hercules" (Cortex-A78) cores rather than Nvidia-designed custom ARM cores.

Also at Wccftech.

Related: Nvidia Demos a Car Computer Trained with "Deep Learning"
Nvidia Announces Jetson Nano Single-Board Computer
Nvidia Supercomputer to Crunch Autonomous Vehicles Data


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:16PM (5 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:16PM (#933971) Journal

    The human brain energy consumption is roughly 20% of the entire body.
    If we'd take it as a metric, the self-driving car SoCs available are still primitive in this regard.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:20PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:20PM (#933974) Journal

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/11913/nvidia-announces-drive-px-pegasus-at-gtc-europe-2017-feat-nextgen-gpus [anandtech.com]

    NVIDIA has stated that Drive PX Pegasus will be air-cooled, although it's likely to be right at the edge of what's reasonable. WIth a 500W TDP, NVIDIA is pushing the envelope on performance in part by packing so much hardware into a single board. Not that a car will have any kind of trouble delivering that kind of power, of course, but it's quite the interesting change in car design when we're talking about significant amounts of power being dedicated to a non-mechanical operation.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:50PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:50PM (#933984)

      So now our cars are going to contribute to global warming?

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)

        by Freeman (732) on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:58PM (#933990) Journal

        . . . please note, cars don't run on rainbows, and ever so few run on hydrogen. Personally, I think we missed the environmentally friendly boat by not picking up hydrogen vehicles and running with it.

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        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:35AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:35AM (#934016)

          Nope... the big miss was when the idiot hippies stopped development of nuclear tech. If it weren't for those tree-hugging left wing morons we would have safe, clean nuclear power plants in every city. No AGW. And nuclear powered cars would have eliminated demand for fossil fuels relegating middle east goat-fuckers back to the medieval irrelevance they enjoyed before petrodollars made them so uppity.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:17AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:17AM (#934003) Journal

        After a few node shrinks, what took a kilowatt will be down to 100 Watts.

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