The latest company to participate in the autonomous driving trend is NVIDIA. The company has recently released a mobile processor, Parker. Reportedly, the item will power the next generation of self-driving vehicles.
How Does It Help Self-Driving?
According to Auto Connected Car, Parker should be able to deliver top-end performance while providing energy efficiency. Furthermore, the features of the same will provide much more to the industry - deep learning, a hardware-based safety engine for reliable fault detection and error processing, hardware-level virtualization and feature-rich IO ports for automotive integration.
In terms of deep learning, NVIDIA Parker is perfect as it is built around the company's Pascal GPU and Denver CPU. With this, the new item is able to deliver 1.5 teraflops of performance. With this much power, the vehicles should be able to make cars smart enough to recognize and correspondingly respond to various obstacles.
Reportedly, Parker is able to deliver more than any current mobile processor, by at least 50 percent. Furthermore, it includes a dual-CAN (controller area network) interface, which connects to various electronic control units, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet to transfer audio and video streams.
"Modern artificial intelligence and GPU breakthroughs enable us to finally tackle the daunting challenges of self-driving cars," NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said. "Nvidia's GPU is central to advances in deep learning and supercomputing. We are leveraging these to create the brain of future autonomous vehicles that will be continuously alert, and eventually achieve superhuman levels of situational awareness."
What Else Can It Do?
As eWeek adds, Parker is not actually limited to the autonomous vehicle industry, though it is the priority. This is because NVIDIA executives have reached the conclusion that artificial intelligence and the self-driving industry are key markets. In addition, the item can also be incorporated into a vehicle's digital cockpit.
However, NVIDIA"s newest device can also be expanded for use in the mobile and gaming industries.
