Drive Thor will be put into production in 2025, and its striking reason is not only because it is an upgraded version of the NVIDIA Drive Orin chip, it also replaces Drive Atlan. Nvidia founder and CEO Huang Renxun said at the company's GTC event that Nvidia will give up the Drive Atlan chip system ahead of schedule because of Drive Thor. He said that in the competition to develop larger and stronger chips, Nvidia chose the Drive Thor chip, which has a computing power of 2000 trillion floating-point computing , and its computing power and throughput have doubled.
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Danny Shapiro, vice president of Nvidia's automotive business, said: "In most cars today, driver-assisted driving systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera rearview mirrors, digital instrument clusters and infotainment systems are controlled by different computers distributed throughout the car. But by 2025, these functions will no longer be independent, and Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to effectively integrate these functions into one system and reduce the cost of the entire system."
In other words, Nvidia only needs a chip to control all in-car functions, helping automakers produce software-defined autonomous vehicles, and to continuously upgrade online. Shapiro explained that Drive Thor will be able to replace a large number of chips and cables in cars, and will improve in reducing costs and energy consumption.
Nvidia already has several customers using its Drive series chips to build software-defined cars. For example, Volvo announced at the CES conference in January that its new autonomous driving capabilities will be powered by Drive Orin. The automaker also said it will use the Qualcomm 's Snapdragon chip to power its infotainment system.
According to Shapiro, the luxury electric car startup Zeekr (Zeekr) will become its first customer of Drive Thor chip. Starting in 2025, Zekr will use Nvidia's chips in its next-generation cars.
Shapiro also said that Xiaopeng has used Drive Orin chips in its G9 SUVs, and the car will be able to support higher-level driver-assisted driving functions, "such as parking and driving on main roads and secondary streets, highways and private roads, as well as safely handling highways, city roads and toll routes."Xiaopeng plans to launch the City Navigated Guided Pilot ADAS system on the G9, and will sign a contract to use upgraded chips.
Shapiro pointed out that autonomous driving solutions provider QCraft will start an autonomous driving taxi business powered by Drive Orin in China.
Other automakers that have previously announced that Drive Orin are the electric vehicle companies under Baidu , Jidu, NIO , Ideal, Extraordinary, Zhiji and Polaris. General Motors' autonomous driving unit Cruise said last week that it has developed its own chip, which will be deployed in 2025. However, the company still uses Nvidia chips.
[Source: NetEase Technology]
