NVIDIA took the cloak off Parker, their newest mobile processor that will power the next generation of autonomous vehicles. Speaking at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California, NVIDIA revealed the architecture and underlying technology of this highly advanced processor, which is ideally suited for automotive applications like self-driving cars and digital cockpits.
Parker was mentioned at CES earlier this year, and was introduced with the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 platform which uses two Parker processors and two Pascal architecture-based GPUs to power deep learning applications.
More than 80 car-makers, tier one supplier and university research centres around the world are now using the DRIVE PX 2 system to develop autonomous vehicles. This includes Volvo, which plans to road test DRIVE PX 2 systems in XC90 SUVs next year.
Parker delivers high performance and energy efficiency, while supporting features important to the automotive market such as deep learning, hardware-level virtualization for tighter design integration, a hardware-based safety engine for reliable fault detection and error processing, and IO ports for automotive integration.
The new 256-core Pascal GPU, in Parker, delivers the performance needed to run advanced deep learning inference algorithms for self-driving capabilities. It additionally offers raw graphics performance and features to power multiple high-resolution displays, such as cockpit instrument displays and in-vehicle infotainment panels.
Parker includes hardware-enabled virtualization that supports up to eight virtual machines. Virtualisation enables car-makers to use a single Parker-based DRIVE PX 2 system to concurrently host multiple systems, such as in-vehicle infotainment systems, digital instrument clusters and driver assistance systems. Parker is also a scalable architecture.
Automakers can use a single unit for highly efficient systems. Parker is architected to support both decode and encode of video streams up to 4K resolution @60 fps, enabling automakers to use higher resolution in-vehicle cameras for accurate object detection, and 4K display panels to enhance in-vehicle entertainment experiences.
