Silicon Updates: Mercedes and Nvidia announce Drive AGX Orin SoC for Software-Defined Car

Daimler's Mercedes and Nvidia together are initiating a new technology in the Automobile industry – the Software-Defined Car (SDC). This can be compared to that of a mobile device in the modern world. We buy a mobile, get latest software via updates and use it with the upgraded features. SDC also works in a similar approach. The customer buys a car, downloads new features or updates periodically. Some of these features may not be even available at the time of purchase. In technical terms, the Electronic Control Units (ECUs) are replaced with hardware.

Image source : Google

In the automobile industry, cars are categorized into four levels based on the human interaction.

Level 1 – Completely manual (old generation cars)

Level 2 – The car assists the driver (with navigation and ABS etc.)

Level 3 – Human intervention is needed at times (for parking, paying tolls etc.)

Level 4 – No need of human interaction at all

Tesla stood as the first ever initiative in autonomous cars over past years. Later, Volkswagen emulated Tesla in a project is now extracting its fruit in the form of all-electric car. This all-electric car by employs single master electronic architecture that helps in powering all the electric and self-driving cars that are manufacture by Volkswagen. However, there has been a delay in the launch of these all-electric cars due to a glitch in the software.

This give us a hint that Daimler might emerge into software industry in order to develop its own software. However, it is not quite sure how Daimler manages the software. The spokesman of Daimler – Bernhard Wardin – stated that the model that is launched as SDC was selected but he declined to disclose the model and the name of the car.

Technical details of Drive AGX Orin SoC:

The AGX Orin SoC was fabricated with 17 billion transistors. Nvidia claims that the SoC is a new generation deep learning and computer vision accelerator. The AGX Orin SoC is expected to deliver as many as 200 trillion operations per second. This number is nearly seven times higher than that of the performance of Nvidia’s Xavier series SoCs. It’s quite noticeable that Nvidia has announced Orin series where Xavier itself started shipping last year.

Nvidia Xavier Series SoC
Image source : Google

With his advent of an entirely new series of SoC, Daimler’s Mercedes falls into the cars working on “Level 4” category. Though Audi is closely working on Leve 4 car, it uses Nvidia’s Xavier SoC. With all the automobile companies putting their effort in manufacturing Level 4 cars, the automobile industry seems to face tough competition.

Danny Shapiro, Nvidia’s senior director of automotive stated the following.

In modern cars, there can be 100, up to 125, ECUs. Many of those will be replaced by software apps. That will change how different things function in the car—from windshield wipers to door locks to performance mode.