Nvidia Drive Thor Could Be The Ultimate Self-Driving Car Chip

Nvidia has announced the next generation of its self-driving car platform -- Nvidia Drive Thor which is the successor to Nvidia Drive Orin. Thor production will start only in 2025 and its main claim to fame is that it will replace the need for a multitude of chipsets that are currently used -- as cars often need a separate chip for autonomous driving or ADAS, a separate chip to power infotainment systems and a separate chip to control core car functions. This software agnostic platform will unify everything under one chipset architecture. 

Nvidia is so gung-ho about Thor that it will be superseding the Drive Atlan platform in its portfolio. Atlan is now being scrapped as Nvidia is now focussing on Thor which according to Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang has 2,000 teraflops of performance which will be 2x in terms of compute to the Atlan chipset. 

Nvidia believes the fact Thor can replace other chips and unify all use cases under one architecture will provide cost benefits to customers. The release of software updates over the air will also become easier as right now software engineers have to write code for differing chipset platforms and integrate them and then release updates. This is a slow, in-efficient form of releasing updates something that does not happen in the space of smartphones or PCs. 

“If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle,” said Nvidia’s vice president of automotive, Danny Shapiro. 

“In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost,” he added. 

Nvidia also has many B2B customers that have software-defined fleets. Customers like Volvo have already said that their autonomous driving capabilities will be based on Nvidia Drive Orin, in the future, this will almost certainly mean that in the future Volvo will be using Thor, which is now the anointed successor to Orin. 

Right now, Nvidia loses a lot of ground to Qualcomm as many automakers choose Qualcomm’s Snapdragon cockpit platform to power their infotainment systems. In the space of autonomous driving, Nvidia’s solutions are widely appreciated with even Mercedes Benz adopting them but they have stiff competition from Intel’s MobilEye which is the market leader. On the low-end Nvidia loses ground to Qualcomm as almost every car needs chips for infotainment systems and at the high end it loses to MobilEye. This unification is Nvidia’s solution to counter Qualcomm and MobilEye. 

Already, Geely-owned Zeekr has announced that it will be the first to use Thor. But Zeekr is an early adopter of many technologies including CATL’s new batteries. It is also a China-only brand, but the good news for Nvidia is that its next-generation cars will start using Thor from 2025 onwards.

In China, Nvidia has many customers like XPeng which is often called the Tesla of China. Its G9 SUV is already using the Drive Orin platform for ADAS. Now XPeng has even started a pilot programme for city navigated guided pilot ADAS on its P5 sedan and this will also eventually be rolled out on the G9. There is a robotaxi service called QCraft in China which will have its fleet powered by Orin and there are many more customers like Baidu’s JiDU Auto, Nio, and even Polestar. 

But the problem for Nvidia could be the geopolitical tensions between the US and China. Its chips are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan. Additionally, due to a new US mandate, there could be a chance that Nvidia will not be able to sell its chips to Chinese brands as the Biden government has made moves to address the risk of military end use from Russia and China. 

Already, Nvidia’s server chips the A100 and H100 graphic processor are barred from sale to Chinese brands even though they are made in China. Nvidia remains the most valuable semiconductor company in the world, but its market cap has taken a beating thanks to the crash in the value of cryptocurrencies and the cancellation of its plan to acquire ARM after pushback from regulators across the world. 

The automotive space has been viewed as a growth engine, as even in traditional avenues of strength it has new competition bubbling. In the space of GPUs, Intel is now starting to encroach into its territory with its new ARC GPUs alongside old foe AMD whose Radeon processors are even used in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One Series X. Hence microchips for cars are critical for Nvidia, but it has competition across the board.