NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference covers much more than just gaming graphics cards. The company had some exciting news to share, including developments in the autonomous vehicle space. At the GTC keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared exciting news about a new system-on-chip (SoC) named Drive Thor. NVIDIA mentions that it created the chip with the newest advancements in graphics and processing to deliver 2,000 teraflops of performance, all while being mindful of costs.

NVIDIA shares that Drive Thor has the ability to bring together all the different functions of vehicles — like infotainment, the digital dashboard, sensors, parking, and autonomous operation — to enhance efficiency. Vehicles equipped with the chipset can run Linux, QNX, and Android all at the same time! With the impressive processing power needed for autonomous vehicle operations, automakers can actually use two of the Drive Thor chipsets together by utilizing NVLink-C2C chip interconnect technology to run a single operating system.

NVIDIA also mentions that the SoC represents a big step forward in “deep neural network accuracy.” The chipset features a transformer engine, which is a fresh addition to the NVIDIA GPU Tensor Core. NVIDIA mentions that transformer networks handle video data as one cohesive frame, allowing the compute platform to manage more data as time goes on. It mentioned that the SoC can enhance the inference performance of transformer deep neural networks by as much as nine times, “which is crucial for handling the large and intricate AI workloads linked to self-driving.”

The SoC features NVIDIA’s Drive Orin chipset, taking the place of Drive Atlan. It will be used in vehicles that will begin production in 2025. NVIDIA’s first customer is the Geely-owned EV brand Zeekr. In the meantime, NVIDIA has welcomed two more Drive Orin partners: the automakers Xpeng and QCraft.