Flying, driving, gaming, racing… amid the first-ever virtual Consumer Electronics Show this week, NVIDIA-powered technologies spilled out in all directions.
In automotive, Chinese automakers SAIC and NIO announced they’ll use NVIDIA DRIVE in future vehicles.
In gaming, NVIDIA on Tuesday led off a slew of gaming announcements by revealing the affordable new RTX 3060 GPU and detailing the arrival of more than 70 30-series GPUs for gamers and creatives.
In robotics, the Skydio X2 drone has received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems.
And in, well, a category all its own, the Indy Autonomous Challenge, unveiled Thursday, will pit college teams equipped with sleek, swift vehicles equipped with ADLINK DLAP-8000 robot controller powered by NVIDIA GPUs against each other for a $1.5 million prize.
This week’s announcements were just the latest examples of how NVIDIA is driving AI and innovation into every aspect of our lives.
Game On
Bringing more gaming capabilities to millions more gamers, NVIDIA Tuesday announced more than 70 new laptops will feature GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs and unveiled the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card for desktops, priced at just $329.
All are powered by the award-winning NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture, the second generation of RTX with enhanced Ray Tracing Cores, Tensor Cores, and new streaming multiprocessors.
NVIDIA also announced Call of Duty: Warzone and Square Enix’s new IP, Outriders. And Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach and F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch will be adding RTX ray tracing and DLSS.
The games are just the latest to support the real-time ray tracing and AI-based DLSS (deep learning super sampling) technologies, known together called RTX, which NVIDIA introduced two years ago.
The announcements were among the highlights of a streamed presentation from Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business.
Amid the unprecedented challenges of 2020, “millions of people tuned into gaming — to play, create and connect with one another,” Fisher said. “More than ever, gaming has become an integral part of our lives.”
Hitting the Road
In automotive, two Chinese automakers announced they’ll be relying on NVIDIA DRIVE technologies.
Just as CES was starting electric car startup NIO announced a supercomputer to power its automated and autonomous driving features, with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin at its core.
The computer, known as Adam, achieves over 1,000 trillion operations per second of performance with the redundancy and diversity necessary for safe autonomous driving.
The Orin-powered supercomputer will debut in NIO’s flagship ET7 sedan, scheduled for production in 2022, and every NIO model to follow.
And on Thursday, SAIC, China’s largest automaker, announced it’s joining forces with online retail giant Alibaba to unveil a new premium EV brand, dubbed IM for “intelligence in motion.”
The long-range electric vehicles will feature AI capabilities powered by the high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA DRIVE Orin compute platform.
The news comes as EV startups in China have skyrocketed in popularity, with NVIDIA working with NIO along with Li Auto and Xpeng to bolster the growth of new-energy vehicles.
Taking to the Skies
Meanwhile, Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight, today announced it received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems for the Skydio X2.
Skydio’s new autonomous drone offers enterprise and public sector customers up to 35 minutes of autonomous flight time.
Packing six 4k cameras and powered by the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 mobile supercomputer, it’s built to offer situational awareness, asset inspection, and security patrol.