NVIDIA's new Drive PX Pegasus: Volta + 'next-gen' GPUs

NVIDIA has just announced its next-gen Drive PX Pegasus board, a major successor to the Drive PX 2 board that is found in some Tesla vehicles. The new Drive PX Pegasus board has a freakin' performance jump of nearly 10x, which is absolutely incredible.

The new Drive PX Pegasus board features 320 DL TOPs, up from the 24 DL TOPs found on the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 board. We have 2 x next-gen discrete GPUs inside (that are NOT Volta...), two Volta iGPUs, and 2 x Xavier system-on-a-chips (SoCs). There's also 16 x NVIDIA ARM-based CPU cores, 2 x Volta iGPU cores, and up to 500W of power consumption (up from 250W on the previous-gen board).

NVIDIA co-founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang said during GTC Europe 2017: "Creating a fully self-driving car is one of society's most important endeavors - and one of the most challenging to deliver. The breakthrough AI computing performance and efficiency of Pegasus is crucial for the industry to realize this vision. 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".

NVIDIA says that their new Drive PX Pegasus board will usher in "Level 5: driverless robotaxis" which gives me tingles all over my body. Technologically as well, tingles continue flowing through my body at the news of a huge 1TB/sec+ of memory bandwidth. Insanity.

The company explained Drive PX Pegasus, saying that DRIVE PX Pegasus is powered by four high-performance AI processors. It couples two of Xavier system-on-a-chip processors - featuring an embedded GPU based on the Volta architecture - with two next-generation discrete GPUs with hardware created for accelerating deep learning and computer vision algorithms. The system will provide the enormous computational capability for fully autonomous vehicles in a computer the size of a license plate, drastically reducing energy consumption and cost".

NVIDIA continues: "Pegasus is designed for ASIL D certification - the industry's highest safety level - with automotive inputs/outputs, including CAN (controller area network), Flexray, 16 dedicated high-speed sensor inputs for camera, radar, lidar and ultrasonics, plus multiple 10Gbit Ethernet connectors. Its combined memory bandwidth exceeds 1 terabyte per second".