On Tuesday, at the GPU Technology Conference in Suzhou, China, NVIDIA introduced DRIVE AGX Orin, a highly advanced AI software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles. 

According to NVIDIA, the platform is powered by a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Orin, which consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of R&D investment. 

“Orin will be powered by new NVIDIA chips that can achieve 200 TOPS — nearly 7x the performance of the previous generation SoC Xaiver — and is designed to handle the large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots, while achieving systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D,” notes NVIDIA in a blog post.

“Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society’s greatest computing challenge,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The amount of investment required to deliver autonomous vehicles has grown exponentially, and the complexity of the task requires a scalable, programmable, software-defined AI platform like Orin.”

“NVIDIA’s long-term commitment to the transportation industry, along with its innovative end-to-end platform and tools, has resulted in a vast ecosystem — virtually every company working on AVs is utilising NVIDIA in its compute stack,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Navigant Research. “Orin looks to be a significant step forward that should help enable the next great chapter in this ever improving technology story.”

Apart from the new hardware announcement, it also announced its plans to open sources many of its autonomous driving models. The company plans to open source AI systems that ship with Drive AGX, which are designed to recognise traffic lights, roads signs, objects and pedestrians.