CES 2017: NVIDIA keynote highlights

NVIDIA’s opening keynote at CES 2017 has drawn a lot of attention. The company has turned their efforts towards consistent innovation and improvement which also means putting out new stuff.

The speech lasted over an hour, entirely presided by Jen-Hsung Hwang, who’s been leading the company for the last 23 years. The businessman graduated from Oregon State and Stanford University. He’s also NVIDIA’s co-founder.

Most articles currently revolve around NVIDIA’s dedicated GPU system for self-driving cars and their autonomous BB8 sedan, arguably one of their most ambitious projects to date. Mr. Hwang, however, gave showgoers a tour of the future that included many new technologies and advancements.

NVIDIA’s vision revolves around four key areas of technology

The company, as stated in previous press releases, looks to focus (and improve upon) gaming, VR/AR/MR, data centers, and autonomous vehicles.

Mr. Hwang emphasized his company’s repeated growth over the years and the importance of e-sports before making his first announcement. GeForce Experience will connect to Facebook Live for sharing (and other social networks apparently).

The second announcement was the GeForce Now cloud-based platform, who will bring on-demand gaming to a wider audience. GeForce Now will come in March of this year and will cost $25 for 20 hours of play.

The NVIDIA Spot, which works in combination with Google Assistant and Samsung Smart Things, closed the first bit with as the most powerful gadget, a seemingly enhanced and even more connected type of AI assistant, sure to compete head-to-head with Amazon’s Echo Dot.

Other announcements included the Shield entertainment hub, which will connect with the above assistant and will offer a varied set of options in 4K HDR and the first Google Assistant version for television, which takes voice-controlled leisure activities to a new level.

The XAVIER AI supercomputer for self-driving cars

NVIDIA will also release a super computer for future autonomous vehicles. The XAVIER model has an 8-core Custom ARM64 CPU, NVIDIA 512 Core Volta GPU.

Hwang remarked that XAVIER contains “the performance of a high-end gaming PC shrunk into a little tiny chip” that performs 30 trillion operations in just 30 watts. The supercomputer preceded NVIDIA’s AI co-pilot, which aims to control the entirety of a car, inside and out.

This new Auto Pilot by NVIDIA will function by also monitoring the driver’s movements with a set of internal cameras, head-tracking, eye-tracking, and lip-reading abilities.

NVIDIA will also partner with German car parts maker ZF and Bosch to produce these technologies.

Source: YouTube NVIDIA Channel