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Meet Xavier, NVIDIA’s next-gen SoC with its sights set on autonomous driving and AI market segments!

By Wong Chung Wee - on 29 Sep 2016, 11:53am

Meet Xavier, NVIDIA’s next-gen SoC with its sights set on autonomous driving and AI market segments!

(Image source: NVIDIA)

At the inaugural GTC Europe 2016, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took to stage and announced the next-gen SoC, Xavier. The new system on chip is in line to succeed Parker, the current SoC for autonomous vehicles. It was recently launched last month at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California.

According to AnandTech, Xavier’s CPU will comprise 8 NVIDIA custom ARM cores that may be derived from the Denver CPU cores that are powering the Parker SoC. As for Xavier’s GPU, it will feature the company’s next generation Volta architecture, and will house 512 CUDA cores. The entire chip will have 7 billion transistors, and the chip die will be manufactured by TSMC using its 16nm FinFET+ process.

AnandTech also reported that NVIDIA aims to “condense much of Drive PX 2 into a single chip.” Also, the company aims to get Xavier’s performance on par with Drive PX 2 but with much less power. In fact, NVIDIA wants to get Xavier’s rated performance to ¼ that of Parker. Currently, Drive PX 2 delivers 20 DL TOPS (Deep Learning Tera-Ops) at 250W. So for Xavier, the company aims to deliver the same performance at 20W, and reduce the hardware footprint at the same stroke.

Besides autonomous driving, NVIDIA is positioning Xavier as an “AI Supercomputer” due to its touted high, 8-bit integer operations. Researchers have discovered that low-precision arithmetic is sufficient for training neural networks, and Xavier is ideal for its role as an “inference processor.” NVIDIA also plans to feed Xavier with “some new computer vision hardware”, which will include a pair of 8K graphics accelerators. The Xavier SoC is expected to ship, in small quantities, in Q4 this year to automakers, tier 1 suppliers, startups and research institutions who are in the business of developing autonomous vehicles.

(Source: NVIDIA, AnandTech)

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