Baidu to use Nvidia PX2 hardware in self-driving car platform

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Chinese tech giant Baidu has signed new partnerships with Nvidia related to artificial intelligence. The company will deploy Volta GPUs in its servers and use the PX2 hardware for its self-driving car platform.

Baidu will use the Nvidia PX2 platform for its Apollo project. Under that name, the Chinese tech giant is developing a platform for self-driving cars, which can be used by car manufacturers to make vehicles. Several Chinese car manufacturers announced on Tuesday that they will use the Apollo platform. These are Changan, Chery Automobile, FAW and Geatwall Motor. Cars of these brands are not sold in Europe.

When cars with Baidu’s technology come on the market, they will probably no longer use PX2 hardware, but Nvidia’s new Xavier soc. In September last year, Nvidia announced that this is the successor to the PX2 platform and that this soc is equipped with a Volta GPU. Several other automakers already have partnerships with Nvidia, including Tesla, Toyota, Volvo, Audi and BMW.

Nividia also announced that Baidu Cloud will use hardware with the new Volta GPU. In May, Nvidia announced the Tesla V100 accelerator equipped with the new GPU. New Tensor Cores have been added to the GPU, which should make the accelerator for servers even better suited for applications such as deep learning. Baidu will also optimize its PaddlePaddle open source deep learning framework for Volta GPUs.

Another part of the collaboration is that Baidu’s voice assistant DuerOS will be added to the Nvidia Shield TV in China. The special version of the Shield TV for the Chinese market should be available at the end of this year. Nvidia announced the new partnership at Baidu’s AI developer conference in Beijing.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the PX2 system at CES in early 2016

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