The Nvidia Drive PX is a series of hardware solutions aimed at providing autonomous car and driver assistance functionality powered by deep learning. The platform was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2015. An enhanced version, the Drive PX 2 was introduced at CES a year later, in January 2016.
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First generation
The first generation of Nvidia's autonomous chips was announced at CES 2015. The line-up existed of two platforms: Drive CX for digital cockpits.
Drive CX
The Drive CX was based on a single Tegra X1 SoC and was marketed as a digital cockpit computer, providing a rich dashboard, navigation and multimedia experience. Early Nvidia press releases reported that the Drive CX board will be capable of carrying either a Tegra K1 or a Tegra X1.
Drive PX
The first version of Nvidia's Drive PX was based on two Tegra X1 SoCs. It was targeted at (semi-)autonomous driving cars.
Second generation
The second generation was announced a year later at CES 2016. This time only a new version of Drive PX was announced, but in multiple configurations.
Drive PX 2
The Nvidia Drive PX 2 is based on one or two Tegra Parker SoCs where each contain 2 Denver cores, 4 ARM A57 cores and a GPU from the Pascal generation. There are two real world board configurations:
There is further the proposal from Nvidia for fully autonomous driving by means of combining multiple items of the Autochauffeur board variant and connecting these boards using e.g. UART, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, USB, 1G Ethernet or 10 G Ethernet. For any derived custom PCB design the option of linking the Parker Processors via some PCIe bus bridge is further available, according to board block diagrams that can be found on the web.
All Tesla Motors vehicles manufactured from mid-October 2016 include a Drive PX 2, which will be used for neural net processing to enable Enhanced Autopilot and full self-driving functionality.
Xavier AI Car Supercomputer
Nvidia announced the Xavier AI Car Supercomputer at CES 2017. Based on the Xavier SoC, the single chip board possesses a similar level of processing power as the Drive PX 2 Autochauffeur configuration.