The next frontier for self-driving cars: Making them human

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was positively giddy as he showed off the company’s next-generation chips at one of the first events of CES 2018.

The processor, called the Drive Xavier, is made to take on one of the most demanding use cases today self-driving cars. And as you’d expect, it’s leaps and bounds better than the previous generation of chips, ticking off plenty of “oh wow” boxes on the spec sheet: 9 billion transistors in an 8-core CPU, a new 512-core GPU, capable of 30 trillion operations per second while consuming just 30 watts.

But that wasn’t why Huang was so excited. 

Nvidia didn’t just build a powerful system on a chip, it made it compact. The company’s previous generation of self-driving chip tech, the Drive PX 2, was a chunky piece of hardware, weighing several pounds and roughly the size of a bulky laptop. By contrast, the Nvidia Drive Xavier is so light that Huang said he could "barely feel it" during his keynote. Read more...