Blackwell GPU power onboard NVIDIA Drive Thor will unleash Gen AI experiences in your upcoming car

Note: This article was first published on 19 March 2024.

Can you believe it? NVIDIA barely unveiled the curtains off the new Blackwell GPU architecture and on the same day, the company confirmed that their previously announced Drive Thor SoC will be using Blackwell GPU architecture too!

As reported previously, Drive Thor will be the first Autonomous Vehicle (AV) platform to feature an inference transformer engine to accelerate inference performance of deep neural networks by many folds over prior generations. With the confirmation of using a Blackwell GPU, the next-gen AV platform is also ready to tackle LLM and generative AI workloads.

To put that in a better context, NVIDIA believes the added in-vehicle processing power will be vital to bring about a more conversational experience with your car. While it might not be a smooth talker (yet) like Michael Knight’s KITT 2000, it would possess more context and nuances to reduce our current robotic style of invoking the driving assistant and its follow-up responses.

Beyond more feature-rich cockpit functionality for drivers and entertainment options for passengers, it will also offer up safe and secure autonomous driving capability, all on a centralised platform – depending on the deployment preferences of each car partner. Drive Thor is also capable of deciphering much more advanced road signs and informing the car occupants accordingly for their next steps due to its powerful onboard processing in conjunction with in-car generative AI processing.

Previously announced in 2022, the Drive Thor SoC pairs an Arm-based Grace CPU with a yet-to-be-named GPU to be capable of processing up to 2,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS). It is NVIDIA’s next-gen solution for intelligent electric vehicles.

 

Next-gen AI Vehicle Partners

Car partners who’ve pledged their support to roll out next-gen AI vehicle fleets with Drive Thor are BYD, Hyper, XPENG, Li Auto and ZEEKR. Even commercial deployment vendors managing trucks, delivery vehicles, robotaxis and more are working on level 4 autonomous driving solutions with the NVIDIA Thor. These are Nuro, Plus, Waabi, and WeRide with Lenovo Vehicle Computing.

Among them, the world’s leading EV car maker BYD, is not only embracing the NVIDIA Drive platform, but also employs NVIDIA’s full suite of offerings such as NVIDIA Isaac and Omniverse to develop tools and applications for virtual factoring planning, to retail car configurators.

Read Next

1) NVIDIA’s new 200-billion transistor Blackwell B200 GPU will re-shape the upcoming industrial revolution

2) NVIDIA is embarking on a project to support humanoid robot development

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