NVIDIA’s new Tegra K1 mobile processor will help self-driving cars advance from the realm of research into the mass market with its automotivegrade version of the same GPU that powers the world’s 10 most energyefficient supercomputers.
The first mobile processor to bring advanced computational capabilities to the car, the NVIDIA Tegra K1 runs a variety of auto applications that had previously not been possible with such low power consumption.
Tegra K1 features a quad-core CPU and a 192-core GPU using the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the basis for NVIDIA’s range of powerful GPUs – including the processors that are used in the top 10 systems featured in the latest Green500 list of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.
Tegra K1 will drive camera-based, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) – such as pedestrian detection, blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning and street sign recognition – and can also monitor driver alertness via a dashboard-mounted camera.
The Tegra K1 is also the first mobile processor to support CUDA – the parallel computing platform at the heart of modern computer vision. In its automotive-grade form, this super chip is hardened to withstand a wider range of temperatures and withstand harsher operating conditions.
In addition, NVIDIA designed the Tegra K1 processor to be fully programmable, so it can be enhanced via over-the-air software updates that support new functionalities as they become available from automakers.
Tegra K1 will be available to automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers as a visual computing module (VCM), an innovative design first introduced two years ago. The Tegra K1 VCM delivers a full computer system for the vehicle, capable of running various operating systems including QNX, Android, Linux or Windows.
