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Qualcomm, Nvidia are driving us nuts – with silicon-brains-for-cars

Put the pedal to the metalization layer

Qualcomm and Nvidia have attempted to wow the world with new electronics aimed at making driving a bit less of a chore.

San Diego-based Qualy has spread the word of its Snapdragon 820A – essentially the forthcoming Snapdrgaon 820 high-end smartphone system-on-chip tweaked to spruce up dashboards and back-of-headrest screens. It includes a 4G/LTE modem, an Adreno 530 GPU that can drive up to five displays, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It can output 4K video, and the modem supports category 12 speeds: 600Mbps down and 150Mbps up.

The 820A family is supposed to be good at running software that detects objects, road lanes, and other vehicles, using computer vision – the ultimate aim is to provide some form of super-cruise-control. The chipset can handle four to eight cameras plus a rearview cam. The processor is a quad-core 64-bit Kryo architecture that's compatible with the ARMv8 instruction set, and will be built using a 14nm process.

People just aren't interested in ho-hum smartphone and tablet iterations these days, so shifting the Snapdragon family towards cars makes sense to Qualcomm. The 820A is in sampling, and was announced at this year's CES hypemare, held this week in Las Vegas.

Next up at CES, we have Santa Clara's Nvidia, and its Drive PX 2 board that automakers can fit inside cars to give them some level of intelligence. It has two Tesla GPUs, built using Nvidia's Pascal architecture. The 3D graphics giant reckons this board has the processing power of 150 Apple MacBooks, allowing it to perform up to 24 trillion deep-learning operations per second. And by deep-learning ops, Nvidia means taking information from onboard cameras and sensors, feeding that data into an AI model, and spitting out decisions. String these decisions together, and the car should, in theory, drive itself without ending in tragedy.

This hardware is a followup to the Drive PX board that went on sale at $10k a pop in mid-2015, which is a followup to the Drive CX board that was unveiled at last year's CES. Volvo, for one, is toying with the PX 2 as the brains in a fleet of 100 SUVs, due to be tested next year. ®

PS: Intel said during CES its button-sized system-on-chip Curie – aimed at wearables and whatnot – is going to ship by the second half of the year. Curie will use Intel's Quark processor core.

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