Nvidia teams up with Bosch for self-driving cars

Smallest AI car supercomputer based on Xavier SoC

Nvidia and Bosch have both announced a partnership and unveiled the new the new AI platform for self-driving cars based on Nvidia’s Drive PX platform with upcoming Xavier SoC during the Bosch Connected World conference held in Berlin.

The base of the new Bosch AI Car Computer, as it was named by Bosch CEO, Dr. Volkmar Denner, during the conference, is the Nvidia Drive PX platform with Xavier SoC. Announced back in September, the 16nm Xavier SoC, a Parker SoC successor, was described an AI supercomputer packing 7 billion transistors and featuring an 8-core custom ARM64 CPU part paired up with 512-core Volta GPU.

Built for deep learning, the Nvidia Drive PX platform, based on Xavier SoC, can train a car to drive by using detection, localization, occupancy grid, path planning, vehicle dynamics as well as other features in order to make the actual AI smarter based on experience.

According to Nvidia, Xavier can process up to 30 trillion deep learning operations a second while drawing just 30 watts of power. Such power was needed to get to the “Level 4 autonomy”, which is where a vehicle can drive on its own, without human intervention.

Currently, Nvidia is enabling Level 3 Autonomy, where a vehicle can drive on its own but still needs a driver to intervene under various conditions, while Level 4 Autonomy will be reached by the end of next year.

Speaking at the conference, Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang noted that he is “proud to announce that the world’s leading tier-one automotive supplier — the only tier one that supports every car maker in the world — is building an AI car computer for the mass market”.  

Bosch, which is considered a tier-one automotive supplier, is looking to get into areas of sensors, software and services, which is exactly what the new Bosch AI Car Computers will bring. By partnering with Nvidia, Bosch is going to tap a rather lucrative market, especially since analysts predict that there will be a total of 150 million vehicles by 2025.