NVIDIA Drive PX 2 is a supercomputer for self-driving cars

NVIDIA has introduced Drive PX 2, the world's first in-car Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer at CES 2016. The company claims it to be the world's most powerful engine for in-vehicle AI. It is designed to serve as the brains of the car. NVIDIA to illustrate that claim said the the Drive PX 2 offers as much processing power as 150 Apple MacBook Pro.

The Drive PX 2 utilizes deep learning on NVIDIA's GPUs for 360-degree situational awareness around the car to determine precisely where the car is and to compute a safe, comfortable trajectory, while taking address of unexpected road debris and construction zones. It can also address poor weather condition including rain, snow and fog and difficult lighting conditions.

It houses two Tegra SoCs capable of 8 teraflops of processing power and two teraflops of deep processing operations, and two Pascal GPUs that offers up to 24 trillion deep learning operations per second. NVIDIA claims that the computer can handle inputs from 12 video camera, radar, lidar and other sensors. This will also Drive PX 2 to tackle the "full breadth of autonomous driving algorithms, including sensor fusion, localization and path planning." It also comes with a liquid cooling system.

NVIDIA also announced DIGITS, a deep learning platform, where self driving cars will take everything they learn and share it with a cloud based network, which can then be sent to other cars. It is meant to make life easier for car companies who are testing autonomous driving.

NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 development engine will be available for early access development partners in Q2 2016, and will be generally available in Q4 2016. Volvo will use the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 to power 100 Volvo XC90 SUVs that will hit roads next year.