NVIDIA Xavier announces on GTC 2016 – is Nvidia making an electric car for Apple?

NVIDIA Xavier with custom ARM64 CPU and 512 CUDA core Volta GPU for 20 DL TOPS

Today at the GPU Technology Conference 2016, Amsterdam, NVIDIA has announced a new project called Xavier, an in-vehicle computer based on 64-bit ARM architecture and also NVIDIA Volta.  Basically Xavier is a new generation of NVIDIA Tegra, it consists of a custom 8-core ARM64 CPU and a 512 CUDA core Volta GPU. Total transistor count on the chip is about 7 billion transistors, and will be based on the 16nm FinFET process.

Compared to the Drive PX 2, NVIDIA Xavier is said have better power consumption, consuming only ¼th of the power it’s predecessor needed (20W) and capable of encoding and decoding HDR video content at 8K. Xavier is aimed to have up to 20 Deep Learning Tera-Ops (DL TOPS), that makes it equivalent to the Drive PX2. This result 1.3 times the performance compared to the Drive PX 2. The SoC specification is almost perfect but the slides doesn’t show neither the RAM capacity or the type of memory interface that it will be using.

NVIDIA has high hopes for this project to further expand their foothold in the automotive business. NVIDIA has also labelled the Xavier as “AI Supercomputer SoC” which can operate alone unlike the discrete NVIDIA Tesla cards. The information regarding Xavier is still pretty vague as the SoC chip won’t begin sampling until end of 2017. NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, said the pre-key notes will be held on January 2017, in Las Vegas at the CES 2017. This is also followed with more insight on the upcoming NVIDIA Volta GPU technology.

Pokdepinion: There was a rumor regarding Apple building an electric car called iCar, and also recently NVIDIA happened to posted a job advertisement looking for a software engineer who is ready to work with Apple Computers. Today with the announcement of NVIDIA Xavier, is it both Apple and NVIDIA are working together in making an electric car that will be powered by Xavier?