Nvidia Unveils Monstrous Platform with 17 Billion Transistors, Next Generation GPUs and Cortex-A78 Cores

Nvidia today introduced one very interesting novelty. It is called Drive AGX Orin. It is a software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots.

In particular, Drive AGX Orin is designed to provide architecture-compatible platforms that scale from second to fifth tier autopilot systems for cars.

But for us it is interesting primarily with its heart. And the heart here is a completely new single-chip Orin system, consisting of 17 billion transistors!

In order to better understand how gigantic this SoC is, just remember the monstrous GPU TU102, on which the top-end GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card is based. This GPU contains 18.6 billion transistors.

But that is not all. The highlight of this SoC is the next-generation GPU. Unfortunately, there are no details regarding this GPU. As for the processor cores, these are the Arm Hercules cores, which in 2020 should enter the market under the name Cortex-A78.

As a result, SoC Orin provides 200 TOPS performance, which is seven times higher than SoC Xavier. In this case, probably, Nvidia has in mind the tasks of artificial intelligence.

Such an advanced configuration should not be surprising, since the first cars with Drive AGX Orin will appear only in 2022, which means that the single-chip Orin system itself will not go into production in the near future.