While NVIDIA continues to reap the benefits of its investments in GPUs, there has been speculation that fixed function application-specific circuits (ASICs) might one day eclipse NVIDIA’s GPU-centric approach. This argument has been fueled in part by noting ’s investment in its own custom ASIC for Deep Learning inference, the TensorFlow Processor Unit (TPU). Now NVIDIA itself seems to have embraced this approach, albeit in a limited fashion, announcing its own ASIC technology for Deep Learning acceleration. Now NVIDIA has announced that the best answer may be a hybrid approach. NVIDIA announced that its next generation DrivePX platform for autonomous vehicles, the Xavier SOC, would consist of ARM CPU cores, Volta GPU cores, and a fixed function Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) for inference.

Source: Forbes May 15, 2017 19:14 UTC