Nvidia unveils post-Volta GPUs powering the Drive PX Pegasus board for driverless cars

The post-Volta GPUs are located on the right of the Pegasus board. (Source: Nvidia)

The Drive PX Pegasus board will power future self-driving cars and provides the highest level of autonomy for AI-driven vehicles. The 500 W TDP board comes with 2 Xavier SoCs that integrate 16 ARM processors, two Volta iGPUs and two dedicated GPUs that are built on a totally new architecture (possibly a successor to Volta).

by Bogdan Solca, 2017/10/11

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Nvidia’s Drive PX Pegasus board was presented at GTC Europe 2017. The new board is said to deliver 10 times the performance of the current Drive PX 2 that ships with Tesla’s cars, with over 320 Deep Learning Tera Operations per second.

Tesla has struck a deal with AMD for its 2019 self-driving cars, so the Pegasus board will probably be shipped with a different car brand (Mercedes maybe?). To put things into perspective, Tesla’s Autopilot program is rated as Level 3 Autonomy, while the Pegasus board gets a Level 5 (highest) Autonomy rating.

Things get even more interesting when analyzing the processing power that comes with the Pegasus. There are two Xavier SOCs that include 16 ARM processors and 2 Volta iGPUs. In addition, Nvidia also included two dedicated GPUs that are based on a new architecture that could either be the Volta successor, or a technology exclusively developed for deep learning tasks. Nvidia also managed to eliminate the cumbersome water cooling system from the current Drive PX 2, as the Pegasus is said to be air-cooled, and all this on a 500 W TDP board.

Jason Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, stated that the Pegasus board is crucial for realizing the self-driving car endeavor. “Driverless cars will enable new ride- and car-sharing services. New types of cars will be invented, resembling offices, living rooms or hotel rooms on wheels. Travelers will simply order up the type of vehicle they want based on their destination and activities planned along the way. The future of society will be reshaped,” explained Huang.