Your guide to a better future

Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and writes about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.

Nvidia revealed a new processor, called Thor, that's designed for cars arriving in 2025 that need a lot more computer horsepower than they've got today.

Thor could help carmakers sweep away a host of smaller processors handling everything from door locks, braking, navigation, entertainment and engine control with one centralized computer system that's easier to update.

Chip designer Nvidia on Tuesday revealed a new processor called Drive Thor it expects will power the autonomous vehicle revolution. 

Thor processors should arrive in 2024 for cars hitting the roads in 2025, starting with an EV from Chinese carmaker Zeekr, said Danny Shapiro, vice president of Nvidia's automotive work. They're based on Nvidia's new Hopper graphics processing unit to better handle the artificial intelligence software that's key to self-driving cars.

"It absolutely will scale up to full autonomy," Shapiro said, referring to Level 4 or Level 5 self-driving abilities, in which cars can pilot themselves without human occupants paying attention or even present.

Nvidia had planned a chip called Atlan for 2024 but canceled it in favor of Thor, which handles AI software at 2 quadrillion operations per second -- twice the speed planned for Atlan and eight times that of its current Orin processor. Thor incorporates one key Hopper feature: the ability to accelerate a powerful AI technique called transformers. Nvidia also expects lower-end Thor variations for the less revolutionary driver-assist technologies like lane keeping and automatic emergency braking.

The automotive processor market is big and getting bigger as carmakers demand more and more processors and other semiconductor chips for driver assistance, infotainment, and the electronic control units that oversee everything from engine combustion to GPS navigation. Each Porsche Taycan has 8,000 semiconductor elements.

Chip designers are cashing in on the new market. Nvidia has $11 billion in automotive chip orders, and a top rival, Qualcomm, has $19 billion in automotive orders in the pipeline.

Among other Nvidia developments at its GTC event:

With 77 billion transistors, Thor will be massive, if not the biggest processor on the market. But it'll let automakers replace a heavier, more expensive and more power hungry collection of smaller chips, Nvidia says. In addition to using Hopper GPUs, it borrows CPU cores from Nvidia's 2023 Grace processor for conventional computing tasks. It also draws technology from Nvidia's newest GPU technology for gaming and design, the Ada Lovelace architecture.

The design will make it easier for carmakers to improve their car software with over-the-air updates, Huang said. Tesla has had a big technological lead in that technology for years. Thor also will be used for robots and medical equipment, Huang said. And it will be able to run three operating systems simultaneously -- Linux, QNX, and Android -- for different parts of the car computing environment. Partitioning technology ensures the less important work, like infotainment, doesn't interrupt the crucial safety-related work, Nvidia said.

This computer rendering shows Nvidia's Drive Thor processor built into an automotive electronics board with many connectors for cameras, radar, lidar and other sensors to enable self-driving cars.

With autonomous vehicles, promised for years but still only in testing, those chips become even more important.

"The industry has recognized that it's a much more complex task than initially thought," Shapiro said of autonomous vehicles. "With safety being paramount, nobody is ready to release these vehicles into the wild until there's more compute."

Correction, 11:30 p.m. PT: This story incorrectly described the first car that's expected to use Nvidia's Thor processor. It will be used in an electric vehicle Zeekr plans to produce, which is due to arrive in 2025.