NVIDIA unveils next gen software defined platform: DRIVE AGX Orin

With automation being a need of the hour, there have been various advancements and developments in myriad fields. This has prompted the industry conglomerates to devise robust strategies on the grounds of sustaining their geographical foothold in the market.

In light of this, NVIDIA, one of the gaming industry giants, recently unveiled its highly advanced software defined platform for autonomous robots and vehicles under the banner called NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin.  Apparently, the platform is endorsed by a new system-on-a-chip, ORIN, which constitutes of 17 billion transistors and is an output of four years of R&D investments.

Sources have claimed that the Orin SoC embeds NVDIA’s next generation GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores to offer over 200 trillion operations every second which yield to nearly seven times the performance of NVIDIA’s previous generation Xavier SoC.

For the records, Orin is designed to hold a large number of applications and deep neural networks which operate simultaneously in the autonomous robots and vehicles whilst achieving systematic safety standards like ISO 26262 ASIL-D.

DRIVE AGX Orin is devised to permit architecturally compatible platforms that range from a Level 2 to Level 5 vehicle, prompting the OEMs to build large scale and complex families of the software products. Speaking of which, since both the Orin and Xavier are programmable through open CUDA and TensorRT libraries and APIs, myriad developers can leverage their investments across multiple product generations.

Speaking about the launch, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang reportedly quoted that building a safe autonomous vehicle is the society’s current greatest computing challenge. The investment required to offer autonomous vehicles across the globe has substantially grown with the complexity of the task calling out for demands of scalable, programmable, and software-defined AI platform just like Orin.

Meanwhile, the principal research analyst at Navigant Research, Sam Abuelsamid cited that NVIDIA’s future commitment to the transportation industry has led to a vast ecosystem development where virtually every company is currently working on AVs whilst making use of NVIDIA in its compute stack. He further added that the launch of Orin proves to be a significant step which would help enable the upcoming chapters in the ongoing technological improvements.

Source credit: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-introduces-drive-agx-orin-advanced-software-defined-platform-for-autonomous-machines