NVIDIA unveils Drive Hyperion 9 autonomous vehicle platform, targeted for use in 2026 production cars

Note: This article was first published on 23 March 2022.

(Image source: NVIDIA)

NVIDIA has just announced its newest Drive Hyperion 9 platform which is targeted to appear in 2026 production vehicles.

Drive Hyperion 9 builds on the success of last year’s Drive Hyperion 8 by adding more processing capability and extra sensors so that the vehicle equipped with it can better understand its surroundings.

The key update to Drive Hyperion 9 is the use of NVIDIA’s newer and more powerful Drive Atlan SoC. NVIDIA claims Atlan will deliver more than double the performance of the current-generation Orin chips at the same power envelop.

Last year, NVIDIA announced that Drive Atlan performance of up to 1,000 trillion operations per second – that’s five times greater than what the current-generation Orin SoC is capable of.

NVIDIA Drive Atlan (Image source: NVIDIA)

With the compute power of Drive Atlan, NVIDIA says vehicles equipped with Drive Hyperion 9 will be capable of enabling level 4 autonomous driving as well as all of the convenience and safety features provided by NVIDIA Drive Concierge.

Because Atlan can process so much more data, Drive Hyperion 9 will also have a more advanced and comprehensive suite of sensors.

Drive Hyperion 9 will consist of 14 cameras, 9 radars, 3 lidars, and 20 ultrasonic sensors to deliver autonomous and assisted driving features. In addition to these exterior cameras and sensors, Drive Hyperion 9 will also have 3 interior cameras and a single interior radar for occupant sensing.

NVIDIA says Drive Hyperion 9 will feature in 2026 production vehicles. However, it did not reveal which automakers will be implementing this new platform in their vehicles.

Here are all the other key highlights from NVIDIA GTC 2022