Nvidia has announced an agreement to expand its collaboration with Volvo Cars to allow increased autonomous driving functions in future vehicles. Under the deal, Nvidia will supply Volvo with its latest ‘Drive Orin’ system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology to power the autonomous driving computer in its next-generation cars based on the SPA2 modular vehicle architecture. The first car featuring Drive Orin technology will be the Volvo XC90 due next year.
The partners said the Drive Orin technology will work together with software developed in-house by Volvo Cars and Zenseact to create an advanced sensor suite that includes LiDAR technology developed by Luminar as well as steering and braking backup systems. The aim is to convert Volvo’s fleet into safer, more personal and sustainable vehicles that are easily programmable and perpetually upgradable via over-the-air software updates, said Nvidia.
Separately, Nvidia announced that it is also developing a new AI-enabled onboard computer SoC dubbed Atlan to give cars “data centre-like” performance. The chip will include Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture, new Arm CPU cores as well as deep learning and computer vision accelerators, and is expected to be read for carmakers’ 2025 models, said the company.
