For two decades, NVIDIA says it has pioneered visual computing, the art and science of computer graphics. Its technologies are finding applications in video games, movie production, product design, medical diagnosis and scientific research. Automotive can now be added to the list. Ian Adcock spoke to the company’s marketing director, Danny Shapiro, to find out more.
“In 15 years time the processor market could be worth as much as $100 billion a year, with each vehicle carrying about $1000 of electronics on board,” says Danny Shapiro NVIDIA’s director marketing, going on to explain that he predicts “a ten-fold increase” in the types of advanced computing and technology going into cars, “advanced sensors and other technologies.”
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This relentless drive towards increased electronic content is being driven by consumer demand for every more sophisticated communication, entertainment and navigation technologies but also by legislative requirements for improved safety and all the sensors and powerful computing required as the industry cautiously edges its way towards the autonomous car by 2030 or thereabouts.
The new instrumentation system debuted by Audi on the third generation TT and Volkswagen‘s eighth family of Passats is state of the art as far as Shapiro is concerned. “Both are based on two Tegra 3 modules and they’re responsible for different tasks, but ultimately they’re rendering a variety of different types of information dynamically onto the instrument cluster merging the instrument cluster and that central infotainment screen into a single display enabling the different types of information to be personalised based on driver preferences.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, NVIDIA released its latest Tegra K1 mobile processor which is based on the same technology that goes into cloud-based super computers, “These are the most energy efficient super computers powered by the Keplar architecture and we’ve brought that to our Tegra mobile processors.
“This will allow us to do everything from very realistic photo rendering in the vehicle to computer vision, sensor fusion and natural language processing. So I think that we’re going to see a combination of new things in the near term: Things like much better on board speech recognition rather than going to the cloud, facial recognition, gaze tracking and driver alert monitoring. We can put a camera in the car and by using Tegra K1 and computer vision software to monitor if the driver is paying attention and where they’re looking to combine that with driver assistant systems.
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By GlobalData“We also see more of a merging of driver assistance into the screens and head-up displays (HUD), our processor is able to analyse what’s going on around the car through computer vision or sensor fusion and then display appropriate visuals whether they’re on a cluster, HUD or a centre screen.”
Although Shapiro doesn’t foresee a time when electronics will determine purchasing decisions, he predicts that “technology will play a much larger role in the equation.” Ultimately it is about being safe and that’s a big part of what NVIDIA is focused on. “Ok you can have a car with all sorts of whiz bang technology, but if it isn’t well built or safe it won’t sell as well.
“We see technology being used to make cars much safer and autonomous driving is where we’re ultimately going with this. But in the near and medium term it will be just a lot of advanced driver assistance that will dramatically reduce the number of accidents and make people safer on the road.”
The European brands, he says, are leading the way with Volkswagen Group at the vanguard together with the BMW Group. Shapiro maintains that the Japanese and Korean OEMs are pushing hard, but admits that NVIDIA is “working hard” to bring Detroit “up to speed.”
“The German OEMs have been the first to understand this, then the Japanese whilst the domestic US OEMs are trying to figure it out; they need to work with a computer company to computerise their cars. NVIDIA is just that, we’ve built computers for ‘phones and tablets, PCs, we’ve built super computers, servers, and now we’re building a car computer.
“If you look at how others have tried to do it in the past, they’ve tried to do it themselves or rely on a Tier 1 that’s not really a computer manufacturer and that’s where you’ve seen mis-steps and problematic systems. Cars that were well built but whose JD Power ratings plummeted because the user interface or infotainment system was so poor or didn’t work well.
“What you had was a lot of the German OEMs making their mistakes a decade ago and they then had that learning curve well in advance of what’s happened in the past couple of years in the US with the Detroit Big Three; so they got a jump start on them realising that you need to partner with a computer company to build a computer system for the car. And that’s where we’ve been really successful.”
But with all these electronic systems running everything from the air-conditioning system through to powertrain management and sophisticated driver assistance technology, isn’t there a danger of hacking or viral malware contagion? “Absolutely. We solve these problems over time in the computing world, but nothing is foolproof. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse, but by putting firewalls in place, encryption and things like that you can secure the software.”
So, no HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey, moment then? “No.”
