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NVIDIA will power self-driving cars in China
NVIDIA has already forged self-driving alliances with big car manufacturers like Audi, Toyota and Volvo, but its latest is a particularly big deal -- at least if you live in China. The chip designer has unveiled a partnership with Chinese internet giant Baidu that will see the two work together to boost the use of AI. Most notably, NVIDIA's Drive PX tech will find its way into Baidu's Apollo self-driving car platform and autonomous vehicles from "major" Chinese firms. The automotive pact is important enough that Baidu chief Robin Li traveled to the event in one of his company's driverless rides -- even though it was against the law.
NVIDIA made a self-driving car with its Xavier supercomputer
At NVIDIA's CES 2017 keynote address, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced his company's plan to turn your car into "your most personal robot." Specifically, NVIDIA announced the company's AI car supercomputer, the Xavier -- an auto-grade, 512-core Volta GPU and AI platform that's capable of learning how to drive by watching a human driver. To show it off for the CES crowd, Nvidia installed the system in an autonomous Lincoln called BB8 and let it loose on the streets of Silicon Valley.
Apple poaches NVIDIA's artificial intelligence leader
Apple's widely rumored electric car may not be fully autonomous, but it may well have some smarts. The company has hired Jonathan Cohen, who until this month was the director of NVIDIA's deep learning division -- in other words, a form of artificial intelligence. Cohen's LinkedIn profile only mentions that he's working on a nebulous "software" effort at Apple. However, his most recent job at NVIDIA centered around technology like Drive PX, a camera-based autopilot system for cars that can identify and react to specific vehicle types. While there's a chance that Cohen could be working on AI for iOS or the Mac, it won't be surprising if he brings some self-driving features to Cupertino's first car, such as hands-off lane changing or parking. [Image credit; NVIDIA, Flickr]
NVIDIA's car of the future drives itself, has a gorgeous digital dashboard
In-dash navigation and instrument clusters don't need to be pretty, but when they are, it's a bonus. Case in point: NVIDIA's new Drive CX platform. The digital dashboards look pretty snazzy thanks to the company's graphics heritage, with the surfaces for the gauges following the properties of the materials they're simulating. Meaning, not only do the bamboo or carbon fiber skins look like a version of the real McCoy from head-on, but they also reflect light and color in ways that the actual material would in the real world, too. NVIDIA says this is all possible thanks to the newly unveiled Tegra X1 processor.
