Photo by David Becker/Getty Images
Each year at the largest tech conference in the world, Nvidia hosts a press event to show off its latest chips and graphics processors. In past years at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it touted speedy new chips aimed at smartphones, tablets, and game systems. This year, however, its show revolved around what appears to be the next big mobile computing platform: the car.
Within a few years, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said, “There will be more computing horsepower inside a car than anything you currently own today.” In a way, this makes sense. Cars are much bigger than tablets or smartphones, so they can accommodate far more powerful onboard computers. But wait: What will we do with all that power when we’re sitting behind the wheel? Surely we’re not going to be playing video games while weaving through traffic, right?
Actually, we just might. The stars of Nvidia’s show were a pair of computing platforms called Drive CX and Drive PX, both of which are built for cars—and could have us kicking back in our automobiles sooner than you think.
It wasn’t just Nvidia. This year’s CES was surprisingly dominated by automotive technology, from a self-driving Audi to a hydrogen-powered Toyota to more dashboard entertainment systems than anyone could count. CES, it seems, is becoming not just a tech show but an auto show—and the world’s car companies are eager to be seen as tech companies once again.
But let’s go back to Nvidia for a moment, because it’s tech like theirs that will make the future of cars possible. Drive CX, the company explained, is a “digital cockpit computer” that will power an in-dash, Internet-connected touch screen, rearview video cameras, individual “infotainment” displays for each passenger, and more. This type of system was all over the place at the CES in 2015, with Qualcomm, Panasonic, Ford, and others showing off their latest “connected car” technology. It isn’t exactly revolutionary: Early versions of these systems already exist in many of today’s cars, including the Tesla Model S, whose in-dash touch-screen control center is in fact powered by Nvidia.
Judging from this year’s CES, they’ll soon be ubiquitous. The dashboard, it seems, is the new tablet.
But it’s the second system, Drive PX, that points to a wholesale transformation of the driving experience. Nvidia calls it an “auto-pilot car computer.” The system, with an impressive two teraflops of processing power, is optimized for computer vision—the ability for a computer to process images and video and make sense of it in much the same way that the human brain does. In particular, Nvidia says it’s designed to facilitate what techies call “deep learning,” a branch of artificial intelligence in which algorithms come to recognize patterns and form connections between concepts.
One famous experiment in deep learning had Google supercomputers teaching themselves to identify cats in YouTube videos. What Nvidia has in mind is not so different: It’s about cars learning to identify stoplights, lane markings, pedestrians, and obstacles in the road in real-time videos streaming in from an array of cameras attached to the cars. It is, in other words, a potentially major step on the road to self-driving vehicles.
Other steps on that road abounded at this year’s conference. Among the most interesting, if unheralded, was a new LIDAR system from a two-year-old Silicon Valley startup called Quanergy. The company’s CEO, Louay Eldada, told me its solid-state sensors can provide the data needed for a self-driving car far more cheaply than Google’s Velodyne-powered system. It already has deals with Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Renault–Nissan, a rarity for a startup so young. It’s a signal of just how fast the race to autonomous vehicles is beginning to unfold.
That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be ceding full control of our cars to computers anytime soon. As Lee Gomes argued recently in Slate, fully autonomous vehicles like Google’s still have a long way to go before they can safely navigate unfamiliar roads.
Yet Google’s audacious efforts have forced just about every major automaker to take notice, in one way or another. And they were out in force at CES this year, eager to prove that the autopilot revolution won’t leave them behind.
The boldest statements came from a pair of German automakers.
Photo by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
0 comments:
Post a Comment