BYD announced collaboration with Nvidia on intelligent driving technology.
The Chinese EV maker will use the supplier’s Drive Hyperion computing architecture in its new energy vehicles (NEVs) for automated driving and parking, starting in the first half of 2023.
“The cooperation is an important joint effort in the production and deployment of environmentally sustainable NEVs that become increasingly intelligent with over the air (OTA) software updates,” the two companies said in a joint statement. BYD NEVs would have the Drive Orin SoC as the centralised compute and AI engine for automated driving and intelligent cockpit features.
Nvidia claims Drive Orin is the world’s highest performance automotive grade SoC, serving as the AI brain of upcoming new vehicles. Delivering 254 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of compute performance, it has high-speed peripheral interfaces and high memory bandwidth (205GB/sec) to “seamlessly” handle data from multiple sensor configurations “for safe and secure intelligent driving” capability. It achieves systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D to ensure safe, highly advanced intelligent driving.
“Software-defined autonomy and electrification are some of the driving forces behind the automotive industry’s transformation. Through the power of AI and the Nvidia Drive platform, BYD will deliver software-defined EV fleets that are not only safe and reliable but also improve over time,” said Rishi Dhall, VP Automotive, Nvidia.