Uber Selects NVIDIA Technology to Power its Self-Driving Fleets
January 08, 2018 at 12:05 am
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NVIDIA and Uber announced that the ridesharing company has selected NVIDIA technology for the AI computing system in its fleet of self-driving vehicles. Uber began working on self-driving technology in early 2015, and launched the first city trials in Pittsburgh, in fall 2016, followed by a second pilot in Phoenix, starting in early 2017. Over this period, self-driving Uber’s use of NVIDIA’s technology reflects the reality that the computational requirements of self-driving vehicles are enormous. Self-driving cars and trucks must perceive the world through high-resolution, 360-degree surround cameras and lidars; localize the vehicle within centimeter accuracy; detect and track other vehicles and people; and plan a safe, comfortable path to the destination. All this processing must be done with multiple levels of redundancy to ensure the higher level of safety. The computing demands of driverless vehicles are easily 50 to 100 times more intensive than the most advanced cars today.
NVIDIA Corporation is the world leader in the design, development, and marketing of programmable graphics processors. The group also develops associated software. Net sales break down by family of products as follows:
- computing and networking solutions (55.9%): data center platforms and infrastructure, Ethernet interconnect solutions, high-performance computing solutions, platforms and solutions for autonomous and intelligent vehicles, solutions for enterprise artificial intelligence infrastructure, crypto-currency mining processors, embedded computer boards for robotics, teaching, learning and artificial intelligence development, etc.;
- graphics processors (44.1%): for PCs, game consoles, video game streaming platforms, workstations, etc. (GeForce, NVIDIA RTX, Quadro brands, etc.). The group also offers laptops, desktops, gaming computers, computer peripherals (monitors, mice, joysticks, remote controls, etc.), software for visual and virtual computing, platforms for automotive infotainment systems and cloud collaboration platforms.
Net sales break down by industry between data storage (55.6%), gaming (33.6%), professional visualization (5.7%), automotive (3.4%) and other (1.7%).
Net sales are distributed geographically as follows: the United States (30.7%), Taiwan (25.9%), China (21.5%) and other (21.9%).
NVIDIA CORPORATION 
