Nvidia’s Drive Thor with Self-driving Electric Vehicles

The tech that's buzzing in the autonomous industry?

Nvidia has announced bringing Drive Thor into the Zeekr Intelligent electric vehicles.? Here is a detailed overview of what Drive Thor is:

Drive Thor is a computer cluster for cars that makes the vehicle systems completely autonomous. A full-fledged self-driving car that checks on lane aligning with a car entertainment system is what Nvidia focuses on right now.

Drive Thor is a centralized computer chip customized by Nvidia in such a way that it takes care of driving the car itself with lightning-fast performance that is continuously upgradable, safe, and secure. This makes this supercomputer enter the automobile industry with electric cars. Thor is not just for electric vehicles. It can also be applied in robotics.??

What do we know about Thor?

The detailed and simplified answer to the question ‘What is Thor?’ is here. Thor or Drive Thor is a ‘centralized car computer cluster’ and a high-powered chip that makes electric vehicles autonomous. Nvidia is focusing on putting the software with intelligent chips that cut costs for industries and help different industries work on building new plants, the artificial universe, or Nvidia's omniverse. The robot taxi or vehicle learns how to drive in the omniverse and do it in the real world.

• Thor is created with a powerful ability to accelerate an AI technique called the transformer, which is a deep learning model that uses a self-attention mechanism and gives importance to each input given in fields such as NLP (Natural Language Processing) and CV (Computer Vision).?
• Thor is customized with low-end variations that help in lane aligning or track keeping and emergency braking systems.?
• It brings together features that include:

1. Automated and assisted driving,

2. In-vehicle infotainment (IVI),

3. A combination of digital instrument systems, and

4. Driver or occupant monitoring (making the steering wheel an optional car part).

Who are Atlan, Thor, and Orin??

Drive Thor is the next generation of Drive Orin that replaces Atlan. - In comparison, the speed of Drive Thor is 8 times that of Drive Orin and 2 times that of Atlan. Atlan and Thor are not mythological characters if that's what you are thinking about. Atlan is a project of Nvidia that is the predecessor of Thor. It is capable of reaching 1000 TOPS ( or Tera Operations per Second) whereas, thor reaches 2000 TOPS (or 2 Quadrillion Operations per Second). This basically means that Thor can process things much faster.??

Features of Thor???

The automotive industry is growing day by day. With this increase in the necessity for more high-performance processors and semiconductor chips come in. They focus on satisfying the market with needs such as driving assistance, control units monitored, infotainment, GPS navigation, vehicle positioning, etc.

1. Thor has the ability to run three OS at the same time. It includes Linux, QNX, and Android. This is done for different operating systems to take care of different operations needed for the EV under one SoC. The main reason for this partition is to keep functions such as infotainment from not disturbing the driving, lane keeping, or any other safety-based functionalities managed by Drive Thor.
2. It also allows the manufacturers to plug 12 + sensors for the operations of lidar, camera, radar, etc. Here, the data is sorted with an inference transformer engine.?
3. Nvidia also announces that Grace CPU and Hopper GPU cores will be included in Thor since they are Superchips that are used for AI that manages data centers.

Nvidia’s Partnership across the EV industry that involves Thor?

• The Omniverse strategy is extended by the ‘Omniverse Replicator’ which would level up speed in tasks that are needed for the virtual world or metaverse combined with the training of automated vehicles.
• Nvidia Drive Orin is engineered with the autonomous vehicle partnered with Mercedes. Their first set is likely to release by 2024. The partnership was announced in 2020 describing its new generation of electric vehicles.
• Other companies partner with Nvidia include VolvoCar AB, Nio, and Daimler AG. These companies partner with Nvidia to compete with the existing software-driven features that Tesla has in its autonomous electric vehicles.

Reference Articles:?

1. Main Source:? https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/nvidia-computer-chip-for-cars
2. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-unveils-drive-thor-centralized-car-computer-unifying-cluster-infotainment-automated-driving-and-parking-in-a-single-cost-saving-system
3. https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/nvidia-announces-drive-thor-soc-centralize-car-compute
4. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/nvidia-wants-to-be-the-brains-of-your-self-driving-car/
5. https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-launches-new-products-plug-cars-factories-into-its-omniverse-2021-11-09/