Nvidia AI and 5G, Autonomous Vehicles and More

Nvidia GTC21 – Here at Nvidia’s virtual spring GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week Nvidia had big news about its two new AI-targeted GPUs and its all-new Grace data center CPU.

But the company also made a myriad of other announcements about new products and services, from the combined use of AI and 5G to autonomous vehicle technologies, cybersecurity and AI-enabled workflow tools.

In this GTC21 wrap-up, we’ll take a look at some of those new offerings and share Nvidia’s plans for these other technologies.

Nvidia DRIVE Atlan

Melding AI and Nvidia’s BlueField technologies on a single chip, Nvidia DRIVE Atlan is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) built for next-generation autonomous vehicles. Calling it a data center on wheels, Nvidia said that DRIVE Atlan delivers more than 1,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS) and will be ready for use in automaker vehicles for the 2025 model year.

Nvidia DRIVE Atlan chip. Image credit: Nvidia

Nvidia DRIVE Atlan is the latest in the company’s road map of autonomous vehicle (AV) chips, which bring together AI and software, computing, networking and security to serve always-increasing AV requirements from carmakers, the company said.

The first generation of Nvidia DRIVE was the Xavier chip, with performance of 30 TOPS. Xavier is found in production cars and trucks today. The next generation of DRIVE chips, called Orin, delivers 254 TOPS and will be used in auto and truck production starting in 2022.

All three generations of DRIVE, Atlan, Orin and Xavier, are programmable through open CUDA and TensorRT APIs and libraries, allowing developers to leverage their investments across multiple product generations as they establish their future AV production roadmaps, according to Nvidia.

The latest DRIVE Atlan architecture includes Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture, new Arm CPU cores and the latest deep learning and computer vision accelerators. The architectures allow automakers to build software-defined vehicles that can be re-programed and perpetually upgraded through secure, over-the-air updates, the company said.

“The transportation industry needs a computing platform that it can rely on for decades,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, said in a statement. “The software investment is too immense to repeat for each car.”

The biggest new feature of DRIVE Atlan is its inclusion of an Nvidia BlueField data processing unit (DPU), which brings advanced networking, storage and security services to support complex compute and AI workloads found in autonomous vehicles. BlueField includes data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip programmability, as well as security features that prevent data breaches and cyberattacks. DRIVE Atlan is designed from the ground up to handle the large number of AI applications that run simultaneously in autonomous machines.

Nvidia DRIVE Orin to Be Used Across Volvo’s Vehicle Line

Also announced at GTC21 was a move by vehicle maker Volvo to use Nvidia’s DRIVE Orin chips and architecture across the company’s full model line.

The use of Orin will start with Volvo’s next-generation XC90 SUV, which will debut in 2022, bringing software-defined autonomous driving to upcoming Volvos.

Nvidia DRIVE prototype. Image credit: Shutterstock

Volvo has been using Nvidia DRIVE Xavier since 2016 and has been developing AI-assisted driving features for new models with software developed in-house and by Zenseact, which is Volvo’s autonomous driving software development company. Nvidia Orin, which also has a SoC architecture, can handle a large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots, while meeting systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D, according to Nvidia.

Volvo will use Orin chips with its own software and with state-of-the-art sensors such as LiDAR and radar to deliver robust AI capabilities and broad safety standards.

DRIVE Orin was first unveiled by Nvidia in…