Nvidia showcases Xavier SoC, an AI supercomputer for cars

[HEXUS]

This 16-nm FinFET SoC packs 8x ARM CPU cores and 512 Volta stream processors.

Read more.

[azrael-]

Let's start small, Jen-Hsun. While you're dreaming big dreams, why not give us a Parker-based Shield Android TV v2.0?

[3dcandy]

Sod it just bung one of these in

[DanceswithUnix]

Wonder how that chip compares to the PS4 in raw specs, probably better in terms of CPU power.

Video of Nvidia's car. Linux based apparently, so it shouldn't blue screen half way around a corner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-96BEoXJMs0

[3dcandy]

Please wait - downloading updates.

Do NOT power off car

[Nifl]

Wonder how that chip compares to the PS4 in raw specs, probably better in terms of CPU power.

The CPU part is ARM based, so I seriously doubt that. Especially since they are using a term like "TOPS" which means they are trying to make it harder to compare even the theoretical raw performance. This whole thing sounds like the usual marketing bullpoop we know from big hardware companies. You can make insanely efficient processors, but they then end up being unable to do complex computations in few cycles.

[nobodyspecial]

Wonder how that chip compares to the PS4 in raw specs, probably better in terms of CPU power.

The CPU part is ARM based, so I seriously doubt that. Especially since they are using a term like "TOPS" which means they are trying to make it harder to compare even the theoretical raw performance. This whole thing sounds like the usual marketing bullpoop we know from big hardware companies. You can make insanely efficient processors, but they then end up being unable to do complex computations in few cycles.

The soc is clearly NOT aimed at tablet/phone etc perf, so what evidence do you have it isn't a perf spec that others are using for car stuff? At 7B transistors I'm thinking this thing is aimed at massive detection that is required for roads (all objects in the scene it detects I mean). We are talking GTX 1080 transistors here, which only comes in at 7.2B. The previous PX2 system used up to 250w of power for the same 20tops. So I'm sure quite a few cars will be running this, but I doubt it is much of a soc for mobile.

We can only hope they come with a mobile version ASAP (and shield tv 2.0, which I'm waiting for). I'm hoping it quadruples the gpu side since this is only 20w and I want a version that has the gpu power of current consoles (or near as possible) with GDDR5x hopefully. There is a lot of wasted space on the car chip no doubt (dual 8K procs, computer vision chip etc) and I want rev2.0 of ShieldTV to be near 100w so it competes with xbox1/ps4 etc but on andriod's side. That would be great for future unreal4/unity 5.5 etc games and loads of vulkan stuff coming. Just make sure we can put in a PC gpu later (PCIE) and add a hard drive when we want and surely it will sell well (upgradable console? I'm in). Translation, that rev2.0 box had better be xbox1 sized or so. Ship them with a cheap 128GB SSD or something (of course a 2nd higher end model too), but have space for us to add a drive later on our own. NV needs to name a few bluray drives that will work with it also if they don't have an option that it ships with If you want to sell more boxes, make it do more stuff. IF MSFT can ship an xbox with 500gb and 4k bluray for $299, I'll take an android box with the same stuff please

It could be that the Volta 512 cores are just really large, so maybe it is good for games, but I think this particular soc was specifically designed to be cheap and potent for cars EVEN on the low end of the market too speed up adoption. The market will take forever to take off if it's only in $40K and up type cars. Not many people have the money for a Tesla Model S car etc.

[Nifl]

The soc is clearly NOT aimed at tablet/phone etc perf, so what evidence do you have it isn't a perf spec that others are using for car stuff?

After that I stopped reading your wall of text, since you clearly don't know what you're talking about. It's a computer system integrated into a car. What are you even talking about? This isn't a motor or anything that has to do with automobile performance. It's a c o m p u t e r. And there are already plenty of meaningless performance measures for that. TOPS is completely meaningless. IOPS and FLOPS are already pretty bad, but TOPS doesn't say anything. TOPS is probably just frequency times processor count. It's a bad marketing joke.

[lumireleon]

what SOC does Tesla use?

[DanceswithUnix]

The CPU part is ARM based, so I seriously doubt that.

It sounds like this is Denver 2, which is a 7 issue ARM core. That is a truly mental issue width to attempt, the best Intel chips manage about 5 (hard to say with all the op merging they do) and remember the PS4 uses Jaguar cores which are only 2 issue. The problem is feeding those ARM cores, that was a bit iffy in Denver 1 but that was a couple of years ago now. With some wrinkles ironed out, this could be quite the beast.

For those wanting a new Shield tablet, I presume this can be undervolted and underclocked down from 20W to 5W and still be pretty quick.

[Gartokk]

Interesting direction for Nvidia to go, I know they're really into this stuff but a full OS is quite an undertaking!