NVIDIA today introduced NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, a highly advanced software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots. The platform is powered by a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Orin, which consists of 17 billion transistors and is the result of four years of R&D investment. The Orin SoC integrates NVIDIA's next-generation GPU architecture and Arm Hercules CPU cores, as well as new deep learning and computer vision accelerators that, in aggregate, deliver 200 trillion operations per second—nearly 7x the performance of NVIDIA's previous generation Xavier SoC.

Orin is designed to handle the large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles and robots, while achieving systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D. Built as a software-defined platform, DRIVE AGX Orin is developed to enable architecturally compatible platforms that scale from a Level 2 to full self-driving Level 5 vehicle, enabling OEMs to develop large-scale and complex families of software products. Since both Orin and Xavier are programmable through open CUDA and TensorRT APIs and libraries, developers can leverage their investments across multiple product generations."Creating a safe autonomous vehicle is perhaps society's greatest computing challenge," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The amount of investment required to deliver autonomous vehicles has grown exponentially, and the complexity of the task requires a scalable, programmable, software-defined AI platform like Orin."

"NVIDIA's long-term commitment to the transportation industry, along with its innovative end-to-end platform and tools, has resulted in a vast ecosystem — virtually every company working on AVs is utilizing NVIDIA in its compute stack," said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Navigant Research. "Orin looks to be a significant step forward that should help enable the next great chapter in this ever improving technology story."

The NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin family will include a range of configurations based on a single architecture, targeting automakers' 2022 production timelines.