HiGame

When Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES last week he unveiled the company’s next-generation self-driving car platform, the Drive PX 2. According to Nvidia, its Drive PX 2 platform packs the same amount of compute power as six Titan X boards, in just two GPUs. During the show, Jen-Hsun displayed the new system — but what he showed from stage almost certainly wasn’t Pascal.



Image by Anandtech. The label is fuzzy to my eye.

As Anandtech readers noted, the hardware Jen-Hsun showed was nearly identical to the GTX 980 in an MXM configuration. The new Drive PX 2 is shown above, the GTX 980 MXM is shown below. The hardware isn’t just similar — the chips appear to be identical. Some readers have also claimed they can read the date code on the die as 1503A1 — which would mean the GPUs were produced in the third week of 2015.


Image by Anandtech. The GTX 980 MXM

If Nvidia actually used a GTX 980 MXM board for their mockup, it would explain why the Drive PX 2 looks as though it only uses GDDR5. While Nvidia could still be tapping that memory standard for its next-generation driving platform, this kind of specialized automotive system is going to be anything but cheap. We’ve said before that we expect GDDR5 and HBM to split the upcoming generation, but we expect that split in consumer hardware with relatively low amounts of GPU memory (2-4GB) and small memory busses. The Drive PX 2 platform sports four Denver CPU cores, eight Cortex-A57 CPUs, 8 TFLOPS worth of single-precision floating point, and a total power consumption of 250W. Nvidia has already said that they’ll be water-cooling the module in electric vehicles and offering a radiator block for conventional cars. Any way you slice it, this is no tiny embedded product serving as a digital entertainment front-end.
Then again, it is still possible that the compute-heavy workloads the Drive PX 2 will perform don’t require HBM. It seems unlikely, but it’s possible.

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