The new electric vehicle will be equipped with a dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin configuration, making it “Volvo’s most powerful vehicle in terms of core computing power,” the company says. The new supercomputer is part of a unified technology stack called Superset, which Volvo says will underpin all of its next-generation vehicles.
The ES90 will be Volvo’s first car with Nvidia’s system-on-a-chip, enabling it to perform basic functions at lightning speed thanks to the computer’s 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS) capability. This will come in handy when managing functions such as “artificial intelligence-based, state-of-the-art active safety features, automotive sensors, and efficient battery management.”
The Orin system also demonstrates an “eight-fold” improvement in processing speed compared to the Xavier computer from the San Jose-based chipmaker, which was featured in a 2018 announcement of Volvo and Nvidia’s collaboration on automotive hardware. The increased computing power will allow Volvo to gradually expand its deep learning model and neural network “from 40 to 200 million parameters,” the company says.
The ES90 will be built on Volvo’s SPA2 architecture and will be the second car, after the EX90, to be based on the Superset technology stack. Superset is a modular engineering platform that, according to the company, will be used to create safer and more efficient cars, as well as to improve them over time through software updates over the air.
Tesla was the first company to introduce the idea of a connected car with updatable software that can improve over time. Now, other manufacturers are trying to catch up by introducing their own cars with the possibility of modernization. The first major step was supposed to be the Volvo EX90 electric SUV, but its release was delayed due to software issues, and when it finally hit the market, it lacked many of the promised features.
Volvo says it sees a future in which features such as driver assistance technology and autonomous range can be improved over time with this new technology stack. And improvements for the EX90 can be transferred to the ES90, and vice versa.
“The Volvo ES90 is one of the most technically advanced cars on the market today and is designed to be further improved over time,” says Anders Bell, Director of Engineering and Technology at Volvo. “Based on our state-of-the-art Superset technology package, the ES90 puts safety first.”
