Created to address the needs of NVIDIA's automotive partners for an open development platform, DRIVE PX 2 provides unprecedented amounts of processing power for deep learning, equivalent to that of 150 MacBook Pros.

Its two next-generation Tegra processors plus two next-generation discrete GPUs, based on the Pascal architecture, deliver up to 24 trillion deep learning operations per second, which are specialized instructions that accelerate the math used in deep learning network inference. That's over 10 times more computational horsepower than the previous-generation product.

NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 allows the automotive industry to use artificial intelligence to tackle the complexities inherent in autonomous driving. It utilizes deep learning on NVIDIA's most advanced GPUs for 360-degree situational awareness around the car, to determine precisely where the car is and to compute a safe, comfortable trajectory.

"Drivers deal with an infinitely complex world," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO, NVIDIA. "Modern artificial intelligence and GPU breakthroughs enable us to finally tackle the daunting challenges of self-driving cars.

"NVIDIA's GPU is central to advances in deep learning and supercomputing. We are leveraging these to create the brain of future autonomous vehicles that will be continuously alert, and eventually achieve superhuman levels of situational awareness. Autonomous cars will bring increased safety, new convenient mobility services and even beautiful urban designs -- providing a powerful force for a better future."

DRIVE PX 2's deep learning capabilities enable it to quickly learn how to address the challenges of everyday driving, such as unexpected road debris, erratic drivers and construction zones. Deep learning also addresses numerous problem areas where traditional computer vision techniques are insufficient, such as poor weather conditions like rain, snow and fog, and difficult lighting conditions like sunrise, sunset and extreme darkness.

For general purpose floating point operations, DRIVE PX 2's multi-precision GPU architecture is capable of up to 8 trillion operations per second. That's over four times more than the previous-generation product. This enables partners to address the full breadth of autonomous driving algorithms, including sensor fusion, localization and path planning. It also provides high-precision compute when needed for layers of deep learning networks.

Since NVIDIA delivered the first-generation DRIVE PX last summer, more than 50 automakers, tier 1 suppliers, developers and research institutions have adopted NVIDIA's AI platform for autonomous driving development.