NVIDIA's 2016 Tegra SoC Is Looking Even More Interesting

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA's 2016 Tegra SoC Is Looking Even More Interesting

At NVIDIA's CES press conference last night they announced the DRIVE PX2 as a "in-car super-computer" that's "as powerful as 150 MacBook Pros", while this SC is powered by a yet-to-be-announced SoC...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Tegra-2016-SoC-CES

[sykobee]

Quick note - the Drive PX 2 is four separate chips.

2 Pascal GPUs providing most of the GPU power, and 2 Tegra SoCs providing some GPU power.

The Tegra SoCs appear to be dual-Denver + quad-A57 big.LITTLE configurations.

Some analysis suggests the Pascal GPUs are 3 TFLOPS each (to attain 24 DL TOps in total), and the Tegra SoCs are 1 TFLOPS each.

[blackout23]

That moment when your car can run Crysis.

[Tomin]

That moment when your car can run Crysis.

That moment when your car can run Crysis better than your desktop.

I think that at least both of my desktop computers would lose to that.

[L_A_G]

When having a closer look at a picture of the board, I noticed something a bit odd, or at least something that I didn't expect. You see between the two big Tegra labeled chips there's Altera Cyclone 5 FPGA chip and no mention is made of it in any of the articles about this board that I've read so far. While I will have to admit that there are fairly mundane uses for FPGA's like software radios and various DSP jobs, I'm still curious as to what exactly this FPGA is actually being used for.

If you want to see what the board looks like, there's a good picture of it on the first page of this article:

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-drive-px-2/

[Michael_S]

When having a closer look at a picture of the board, I noticed something a bit odd, or at least something that I didn't expect. You see between the two big Tegra labeled chips there's Altera Cyclone 5 FPGA chip and no mention is made of it in any of the articles about this board that I've read so far. While I will have to admit that there are fairly mundane uses for FPGA's like software radios and various DSP jobs, I'm still curious as to what exactly this FPGA is actually being used for.

If you want to see what the board looks like, there's a good picture of it on the first page of this article:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-drive-px-2/

Maybe the FPGA is just there so that automakers can add some custom logic for any reason they want?

[droidhacker]

Is that a water cooler?
I can see it now... the self driving car, owned entirely by people not competent to deal with mechanical things, therefore no maintenance at all, when the engine starts to overheat, the brainboard also overheats, and POW, the automation gets knocked out and you fly off a cliff to your death.

Plus, I'm sure that they'll be running navigation, video player, video games, and internet on it, so dimwit behind the wheel will install malware that crashes the car. Literally.

[L_A_G]

Maybe the FPGA is just there so that automakers can add some custom logic for any reason they want?

Could be... It's just not explained and you'd think most of that could do most of that additional logic in software when you have hardware with this level of performance.

A lot of old cellphones used to have software radios using FPGA's, but when dedicated DPS's went up in performance and down in power usage they mostly vanished. With this you have a LOT of computing power from the CPU and GPU cores, so adding an FPGA to me at least seems a bit redundant.

Then again, you could be completely right about that. The board also contains an Infineon TriCore microcontroller, which was created specifically for automotive uses in the first place and has been used quite a lot of cars since the early 2000's. Against that background this board is probably intended as an "all the bells and whistles we can offer" board for automakers to use in development before they order a version with only the stuff they actually need when they put vehicles using this board into production.

[nils_]

Is that a water cooler?
I can see it now... the self driving car, owned entirely by people not competent to deal with mechanical things, therefore no maintenance at all, when the engine starts to overheat, the brainboard also overheats, and POW, the automation gets knocked out and you fly off a cliff to your death.

Plus, I'm sure that they'll be running navigation, video player, video games, and internet on it, so dimwit behind the wheel will install malware that crashes the car. Literally.

We've already seen it with Toyota and their horribly coded software (7000 global variables...) that lead to at least one death.