Unless you are disconnected from the entire earth due to some natural disaster that placed you on the moon itself, you would have heard cars are becoming autonomous, slowly but surely! Autonomous? That just means they can drive themselves in everyday language, nothing sinister.

How do they do this? They use cameras as eyes, sensors as skin to know if an object is near, GPS as direction, and a computer (processor) – that ties all these parts together – as brain. Now this is the tricky part. A car like that needs a computer fast enough to handle all the data it gets from all these different components in realtime, in other to be able to drive safely to its destination: a super computer with artificial intelligence!

As always with new technology nowadays, tech giants are vying doggedly to get a piece of the action, and who is to blame them? Autonomous cars are looking, everyday, more like they are the future even if they don’t stick around for long.  So when Nvidia – a computer graphics processor giant- showcased their latest endeavour in Jan 2016, it sent a shock round the information technology world. Meet the Nvidia Drive PX 2!

Why is it news worthy you might say, it’s because of its speed. It can deal with 24 trillion computer instructions in a second. In everyday language, it is 150 times faster than your MACbook Pro or I7 Windows computer! So yeah, it is fast, for now! Not only is it a supercomputer in speed, it also runs on artificial intelligence, meaning it learns!

Even though the Drive PX 2 is not the fastest processor in the world, it is one of those that are solely made for self driving cars, and within a year, we are sure to see faster processors for this very purpose. Another glimpse into our futures!