Seems like only a while ago when stories of autonomous artificial servants were only heard about in fiction. Technology advances at a rapid pace, and now these ideas inch closer to reality than ever. Indeed, NVIDIA capitalises on the AI renaissance with a new AI computer for robots called Jetson Xavier.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang describes Jetson Xavier as the next step in AI innovation. Unlike most AIs running software on a cloud, this chipset acts as a brain that helps robots navigate the world.
“Robots that drive, that fly, that swim, that goes underground, that picks strawberries, picks lettuce, picks apples, helps you in the lab, like Jarvis handing you your screwdriver — this little computer is the brains of future intelligent machines,” says Huang.
Jetson Xavier contains six processors that can run 30 trillion operations per second. The six processors are a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, dual NVDIA deep-learning accelerators, an image processor, a vision processor and a video processor. A workforce of 8,000 people has worked on this project over a course of five years. Huang describes this length as the longest processor project his company has worked on.
The processing power of Jetson Xavier matches a $10,000 workstation equipped with graphics processing units. He adds that while this is the case, the processor is easy on power consumption.
With AI-powered robots only becoming more common in security, delivery, and logistics, there’s a lot of potential in Jetson Xavier.
To sum it up, against $10,000 and 1,000 watts worth of processing power, Jetson Xavier goes for a $1,299 price and 30 watts performance. NVIDIA plans to ship the development kit in August 2018.
(Source: CNET)
