At its inaugural European edition of the Graphics Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA announced Xavier, an "AI supercomputer for the future of autonomous transportation." An evolution of its Drive PX2 board that leverages a pair of "Maxwell" GPUs with some custom logic and an ARM CPU, to provide cars with the compute power necessary to deep-learn the surroundings and self-drive, or assist-drive; Xavier is a refinement over Drive PX2 in that it merges three chips - two GPUs and one control logic into an SoC.

You'd think that NVIDIA refined its deep-learning tech enough to not need a pair of "Maxwell" SoCs, but Xavier is more than that. The 7 billion-transistor chip built on 16 nm FinFET process, offers more raw compute performance thanks to leveraging NVIDIA's next-generation "Volta" architecture, one more advanced than even its current "Pascal" architecture. The chip features a "Volta" GPU with 512 CUDA cores. The CVA makes up the vehicle I/O, while an image processor that's capable of 8K HDR video streams feeds the chip with visual inputs from various cameras around the vehicle. An 8-core ARM CPU performs general-purpose compute. NVIDIA hopes to get the first engineering samples of Xavier out to interested car-makers by Q4-2017.