Nvidia's new Xavier system on a chip is great for self driving cars

Nvidia's new Xavier system on a chip is great for self driving cars

While Elon Musk's Tesla, BMW, Google, Baidu, Volvo and just about every other car manufacturer on the planet might be beavering away at developing self-driving cars, Nvidia may already have a solution for them. Its new Xavier SoC and Volta GPU combo is near perfect for self driving cars, since it is able to learn from human drivers.

The 16nm Xavier FinFET design has eight built in ARM CPU cores, with 512 Volta stream processors for powerful computational abilities. The sheer number of calculations per second that this hardware can achieve, has allowed Nvidia to develop some really impressive self driving car software.

Shown off in a new demonstration alongside this announcement, Nvidia's system is able to drive on roads without lines, on roads with or without lanes, off-road, around blind corners, steer around objects, stop if it collides with something, can navigate construction cones and more.

It's a really impressive development that shows that perhaps combining this sort of technology with more traditional self-driving car technology will create something truly autonomous.