Nvidia DRIVE AGX Orin Platform Revealed

Nvidia has just revealed its new Nvidia Drive AGX Orin. It’s their latest advanced software-defined platform for the autonomous vehicle and robotics markets. We know that their hardware has been featured in products from brands like Tesla and Audi in the past, and we expect this will pave the way for their next-gen integrations too.

The new system-on-chip (SoC) is called Orin. It features 17 billion transistors and took them four years of R&D investment. As a combination of their latest GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores, as well as tuned acceleration hardware for deep learning and computer vision accelerators. Nvidia claims it will deliver nearly 7x the performance of NVIDIA’s previous generation Xavier SoC.

Deep Learning

Orin is designed to meet the heavy software requirements of deep neural networks. This is the kind of hardware they need to deliver Level 2 to Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles. As self-driving features advance, their processing requirements are growing exponentially, so I’m sure Orin is going to be a big hit in those sectors.

What Nvidia Had to Say

“Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society’s greatest computing challenge,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The amount of investment required to deliver autonomous vehicles has grown exponentially, and the complexity of the task requires a scalable, programmable, software-defined AI platform like Orin.”

“NVIDIA’s long-term commitment to the transportation industry, along with its innovative end-to-end platform and tools, has resulted in a vast ecosystem — virtually every company working on AVs is utilizing NVIDIA in its compute stack,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Navigant Research. “Orin looks to be a significant step forward that should help enable the next great chapter in this ever-improving technology story.”

Release Date

The NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin family will include a range of configurations based on a single architecture. They’re targeting automakers’ 2022 production timelines, and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this hardware at the upcoming CES 2020 show in Las Vegas.