Nvidia Announces The Drive CX, Its Computing Platform For Cars

At its CES press conference, Nvidia today announced the Drive CX, a digital cockpit for car that is based on the company’s new X1 processor. It will include an advanced visual computing architecture. It can power 16.6 megapixels for cars that have multiple screens — that significantly more than even the iMac 5K Retina display’s 15 million pixels.

“We believe the future car will pack an enormous amount of compute capability,” Nividia said today. Future cars will have “more computing horsepower than anything you own today.” In Nvidia’s imagination, your next car will have a huge number of displays. “We imagine these displays will replace many of the current capabilities of your car. Your mirror could become a smart display. The pillars around your car could become screens.”

Today’s cars also have relatively low-resolution screens. Right now, even a high-end cars (not counting, say, Tesla’s iPad-like multimedia and navigation display) might have a single megapixel on their infotainment systems. Nvidia’s new chip would be able to power far more than that – as many as four Full HD (2 megapixels) simultaneously or even two 4K screens if you really wanted an absurdly nice movie experience for the kids in the back seat.

Besides the screens, the platform can also power features like speech recognition and image recognition.

Nvidia showed off a number of rather playful examples for what your future car dashboard could look like in its keynote today. Whether your dials feature brushed aluminum textures or a more ceramic look may not be all that important, but dashboards have already moved into this direction over the last few years and this new platform will allow the likes of Ford and Chevy to bring quite a bit more technology into the car.

Nvidia will make a reference platform of the Drive CX available to car manufacturers.

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