OREANDA-NEWS. March 24, 2016. Our NVIDIA PX autonomous car development platform received the Award of Excellence in the Autonomous Driving/AI division this week at the 7th Automotive Telecommunication Technology Tokyo exhibition.

The award is the latest recognition of the key role GPUs — and the AI renaissance sparked by GPU-powered deep learning techniques — are playing as automakers race to offer more sophisticated capabilities (see “Accelerating AI with GPUs: A New Computing Model”).

“With NVIDIA’s chips coming into the car industry, autonomous driving has suddenly become a reality,” said Takeshi Natsuno, head of the awards committee and a guest professor at Keio University’s SFC Graduate School of Media and Governance. “Giving this award to NVIDIA has great meaning for the future of the car industry.”

As Much Power as 150 MacBook Pros

NVIDIA’s DRIVE PX uses AI to realize complex control of autonomous driving, which is the crucial task in self-driving.

DRIVE PX is powered by a pair of Tegra processors and GPUs, giving it enough power to race through 24 trillion deep-learning calculations every second, the equivalent to the processing power of 150 MacBook Pros.

That’s enough power to harness the data streaming in from 12 video cameras, lidar (light detection and ranging), radar and ultrasonic sensors to interpret a car’s surroundings, recognize obstacles and plot a path forward for the car.