At Nvidia’s 2024 GTC AI Conference, Nvidia announced that major Chinese automakers including BYD, GAC Aion Hyper, and Xpeng, have embraced the Drive Thor chip to power their upcoming consumer and commercial fleets. This follows announcements made by Li Auto during CES 2024 earlier this year. Nvidia unveiled the Drive Thor back on September 20, 2022, positioning it as the successor to Drive Orin and targeting automakers’ 2025 models.
Drive Thor is primarily designed for next-generation L4 autonomous driving, driver assistance, passenger monitoring, parking functions, and in-car entertainment. The latest Nvidia Drive Thor chip will boast a performance of 2000 TOPS, surpassing the current generation Nvidia Drive Orin chip, which operates at 254 TOPS.
“This next-generation AV platform will integrate the new Nvidia Blackwell architecture, designed for transformer, LLM and generative AI workloads“, announced Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at GTC.
Nvidia is best known for its leadership in GPU development. Also, Nvidia is a frontrunner in automotive System-on-Chip (SoC) technology joining the ranks of Qualcomm. Automakers such as Mercedes-Benz, GWM, Nio, Zeekr, Xiaomi, Hyundai, and Lucid have all integrated variations of Nvidia Drive into their vehicles. We may also note that Huawei and Nio have been developing their own SoCs becoming less reliant on other manufacturers.
Speaking about Qualcomm, it will also launch its 2000-TOPS automotive SOC called Snapdragon Ride Flex. One of the first Chinese manufacturers to use this chip is FAW’s Hongqi. So, Nvidia still has a real competitor in sight.
BYD
The collaboration between BYD and Nvidia commenced in March last year. It was only to create smart vehicles based on the Nvidia Drive Orin platform. At Nvidia’s 2024 GTC AI conference, this partnership was further solidified. All forthcoming electric vehicles by BYD will feature the Drive Thor chip improving autonomous driving in BYD vehicles.
Moreover, BYD will be integrating Nvidia’s Isaac Robot Operating System (ROS), and Omniverse platforms to optimize factory productivity and retail environments. This will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure for cloud-based AI development and training to enhance precision and efficiency.
GAC Aion Hyper
Nvidia and GAC Aion Hyper unveiled their partnership at Nvidia’s 2024 GTC AI Conference. The next-generation L4 autonomous vehicle by Hyper will be powered by the Nvidia Drive Thor chip scheduled for production in 2025.
Current GAC Aion models include Hyper GT and Hper HT. They feature three LiDAR sensors and the Nvidia Drive Orin. This enables them to achieve advanced L2+ level intelligent driving on highways and in specific urban environments. As a leader in L3 autonomous driving, GAC secured an early L3 road test license and conducted extensive road tests in day-to-day scenarios.
Xpeng
Nvidia reported that Xpeng has also confirmed its adoption of the Nvidia Drive Thor platform as the central AI system for its upcoming generation of electric vehicles. Current Xpeng vehicles adopt Nvidia Drive Orin chips.
Source: Autohome
