Nvidia wants to power the self-driving car of the future (and every display inside that car)

There’ll be more computing horsepower inside a car than anything you currently own today.” That’s the assertion Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made in announcing Drive CX, “the most advanced digital cockpit computer in the world,” and Drive PX, an auto-pilot supercomputer.

Drive CX, the display one, is powered by Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture and supports “every major OS in the world” — which for the world of cars includes QNX, Linux, and Android. Basically, it’s a small computer inside your car capable of processing 16.6 megapixels across multiple screens. In Huang’s automotive vision, everything can be a display. Smart mirrors? Check. Displays in the car’s pillars? Check. Head rests? Of course — put a screen on it!

What does that mean in reality, though? So far we’ve seen it add different skins to your speedometer (think: Winamp). Huang is also showing a vertical screen being split into two to show dynamic menus and navigation maps, but mostly it’s crazy neon and faux-metallic speedometer skins so far. At one point, Nvidia starts picking up physical slabs of material and showing off new skins.

As Huang says, “These cannot be recreated simply by pictures. They have to be simulated, they have to be computed.” And he’s right — Nvidia is trying to show off how powerful its automotive computer is. A superpowered speedometer graphics is certainly one way to do.

The other part of Nvidia’s car story is detection — sensors being gradually replaced by cameras. That’s where Drive PX comes into play — a “supercomputer” with two Tegra X1s that can process 12 cameras in real time. Huang is heavily emphasizing “GPU-accelerated learning” here — which is to say, processor-intensive image recognition. “The beautiful thing about the neural network is that, once you train it, if you ask it ‘what’s a car?’ it’ll already know the answer for ‘what’s an Audi?’”

Remember: Nvidia’s announcement isn’t for you or me. It’s ultimately for the car makers. Nvidia needs to pitch a powerful car processor to the Audis, Mercedes, and Toyotas of the world. Which, yes, includes really crazy looking, faux-neon-and-bamboo gauges and “computer vision” that can detect different breeds of dogs.

Audi has, in fact, committed to Nvidia’s vision, sharing stage time with Nvidia and talking up fast-driving autonomous cars and display-laden interiors. To which Huang said, as you might’ve predicted already, “Anybody that needs more pixels is just music to my ear. And don’t forget the backseat!”