The first of Nvidia's autonomous chips was announced at CES 2015, based on the Maxwell GPU microarchitecture. The line-up consisted of two platforms:
Drive CX
The Drive CX was based on a single Tegra X1SoC and was marketed as a digital cockpit computer, providing a rich dashboard, navigation and multimedia experience. Early Nvidia press releases reported that the Drive CX board will be capable of carrying either a Tegra K1 or a Tegra X1.
Drive PX
The first version of Drive PX is based on two Tegra X1 SoCs, and was an initial development platform targeted at autonomous driving cars.
Pascal based
Drive PX platforms based on the Pascal GPU microarchitecture were first announced at CES 2016. This time only a new version of Drive PX was announced, but in multiple configurations.
Drive PX 2
The Nvidia Drive PX 2 is based on one or two Tegra X2 SoCs where each SoC contains 2 Denver cores, 4 ARM A57 cores and a GPU from the Pascal generation. There are two real world board configurations:
for AutoCruise: 1× Tegra X2 + 1 Pascal GPU
for AutoChauffeur: 2× Tegra X2 + 2 Pascal GPU's
There is further the proposal from Nvidia for fully autonomous driving by means of combining multiple items of the AutoChauffeur board variant and connecting these boards using e.g. UART, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, USB, 1 Gbit Ethernet or 10 Gbit Ethernet. For any derived custom PCB design the option of linking the Tegra X2 Processors via some PCIe bus bridge is further available, according to board block diagrams that can be found on the web. All Tesla Motors vehicles manufactured from mid-October 2016 include a Drive PX 2, which will be used for neural net processing to enable Enhanced Autopilot and full self-driving functionality. Other applications are Roborace. Disassembling the Nvidia-based control unit from a recent Tesla car showed that a Tesla was using a modified single-chip Drive PX 2 AutoCruise, with a GP106 GPU added as a MXM Module. The chip markings gave strong hints for the Tegra X2 Parker as the CPU SoC.
The first Volta based Drive PX system was announced at CES 2017 as the Xavier AI Car Supercomputer. It was re-presented at CES 2018 as Drive PX Xavier. Initial reports of the Xavier SoC suggested a single chip with similar processing power to the Drive PX 2 Autochauffeur system. However, in 2017 the performance of the Xavier-based system was later revised upward, to 50% greater than Drive PX 2 Autochauffeur system. Drive PX Xavier is supposed to deliver 30 INT8 TOPS of performance while consuming only 30 watts of power. This spreads across two distinct units, the iGPU with 20 INT8 TOPS as published early and the somewhat later on announced, newly introduced DLA that provided an additional 10 INT8 TOPS.
Drive PX Pegasus
In October 2017 Nvidia and partner development companies announced the Drive PX Pegasus system, based upon two Xavier CPU/GPU devices and two post-Volta generation GPUs. The companies stated the third generation Drive PX system would be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving, with a total of 320 INT8 TOPS of AI computational power and a 500 Watts TDP.
The Drive AGX Orin SoC family was announced on December 18, 2019 at GTC China 2019. On May 14, 2020 Nvidia announced that Orin would be utilizing the new Ampere GPU microarchitecture and would begin sampling for manufacturers in 2021 and be available for production in 2022.
Comparison
Note: dGPU and memory are stand-alone semiconductors; all other components, especially ARM cores, iGPU and DLA are integrated components of the listed main computing device
