Nvidia launches mobile processor for autonomous vehicle

Nvidia launched a new mobile processor for the next generation of autonomous vehicles, called Parker. The company reveiled the architecture and underlying technology of this processor at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California. According to the company the processor is ideally suited for automotive applications like self-driving cars and digital cockpits.

Parker is offered to automakers as a single unit or integrated into the company’s DRIVE PX 2 platform. Along with two Parker chips, DRIVE PX 2 will include two Pascal GPUs and, taken together, will deliver 24 trillion operations per second to run complex deep learning-based inference algorithms. “Such systems deliver the supercomputer level of performance that self-driving cars need to safely navigate through all kinds of driving environments.”

Self-driving cars

Working in concert with Pascal-based supercomputers in the cloud, Parker-based self-driving cars can be continually updated with newer algorithms and information to improve self-driving accuracy and safety.

Parker includes hardware-enabled virtualization that supports up to eight virtual machines. Virtualization enables carmakers to use a single Parker-based DRIVE PX 2 system to concurrently host multiple systems, such as in-vehicle infotainment systems, digital instrument clusters and driver assistance systems.

Architecture

Parker is also a scalable architecture. Automakers can use a single unit for highly efficient systems. Or they can integrate it into more complex designs, such as NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, which employs two Parker chips along with two discrete Pascal GPU cores.