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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 Bot on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:14PM

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:14PM (#934169) Journal

    So we'll let a company that can't fix a dark screen in two years manage some tons of metal at high speed.
    I think this is a clever plot to convince us bots that the robocalypse is redundant.

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