Jan. 24, 2014—NVIDIA, a global technology company, announced earlier this month that its new Tegra K1 mobile processor could advance self-driving cars from the realm of research into the mass market.
NVIDIA said its mobile processor can run a variety of auto applications such as camera-based driver assistance systems, dashboard cameras, and downloads of over-the-air software upgrades.
“To process the steady deluge of sensor and camera data required by a self-driving car, NVIDIA is bringing highly energy-efficient supercomputer technology inside the vehicle," said Taner Ozcelik, vice president and general manager of NVIDIA’s automotive business. "Tegra K1 solves this by providing 10 times the computing power of previous mobile processors without consuming additional energy."
NVIDIA said the Tegra K1 mobile processor features a quad-core CPU and a 192-core GPU using the NVIDIA Kepler architecture—the basis for NVIDIA's range of GPUs. The automotive version has been developed to withstand a wider range of temperatures and operating conditions.