Elon Musk's highly innovative automotive company Tesla Motors had previously announced that their next-generation mass production vehicle — the Tesla Model 3 — will be fully equipped with a top-of-the-line self-driving feature that will be "substantially greater than that of a human driver."
What is even more surprising about its announcement, however, is that NVIDIA will apparently be the one supplying the hardware that will be providing the firepower to achieve the company's bold claim.
The graphic card manufacturer NVIDIA will be a big contributor to Tesla's next vehicle model as each one will reportedly be sporting a specially designed system that will include its high-end GPUs. The new NVIDIA system will apparently be able to process all of the visual cues and sensors that will be placed on the vehicle itself.
According to several reports, the self-driving system will likely contain an NVIDIA Titan graphics processor as its core component. Given that the commercial version of the card costs a whopping $1,200 each, it will be a significant order for NVIDIA that could translate to tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the company in the coming years.
Tesla believes that it could be shipping close to 79,000 vehicles within the year, which means that NVIDIA would have to produce as many Titan GPUs to compensate. Doing the math, NVIDIA will likely be coming out with a ridiculous amount of profit with the Titan GPU's alone.
Initial figures are of course only estimates, which means that NVIDIA could stand to earn even more if the Model 3 will turn out to be a success.
NVIDIA has also already unveiled their latest DRIVE PX 2 system that utilizes their new newest GPU tech to process data from multiple sensors like camera, lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. The system fully translates the different inputs to provide a full awareness of the car's 360-degree environment.
