You could one day buy a Toyota with Nvidia autonomous driving smarts

Computing powerhouse Nvidia has teamed up with Toyota to introduce enhanced autonomous driving capabilities to cars in the coming years.

The two will bring Nvidia's Drive PX AI platform to Toyota vehicles, aiming to put such cars on the road by 2020. Nvidia announced the partnership with Toyota at its GTC 2017 GPU conference in San Jose on Wednesday.

Nvidia touted its team up with one of the world's leading car manufacturers. While Toyota is already working on autonomous driving features, the goal is to bolster those with Nvidia's Drive PX.

"We're combining breakthroughs in AI and high performance computing to  build Nvidia Drive PX, the brain of the autonomous car," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a release. "Today's announcement with Toyota is the strongest indication that this autonomous future will soon become a reality."

Of course, "soon" is still in at least three years, and it's unclear just what Nvidia's systems will look like at that time. The company best known for graphics cards is as committed to self-driving cars as other major proponents, however, and it's already working with Audi to put an autonomous car on the road by 2020.

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The Drive PX AI platform is essentially a mix of the hardware and software needed to enable self-driving, though in a smaller form factor than competing systems, Nvidia claims. Taking information from cameras, sensors, LIDAR and radar, Drive PX processes the data using artificial intelligence. 

We won't have long to wait to see if Nvidia and Toyota's vision comes to life, but this is a big step not just for Nvidia but the autonomous driving industry as well. With more companies throwing their hat in the ring everyday, the race to put self-driving cars on the road is on.

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