Nvidia has shared with financial analysts that it is sampling Drive Xavier today and that full production is expected in Q1 2019. The Drive Xavier is likely to be 20 times faster than the Drive Parker one-chip solution. Xavier is also a one-chip solution that should enable high-level autonomous driving. Nvidia calls this a Level 5 chip but we would be a bit skeptical about its ability to offer full Level 5 self-driving.
Volta meets Carmel
Drive Xavier has a Volta GPU inside with 512 CUDA Cores, eight core Nvidia custom CPU codename Carmel capable of 10 wide superscalar instructions and with expected SpecInt 2000 performance of 2700. The Volta GPU should offer 1.3 CUDA TFLOPS and 20 Tensor Core TOPS.
Back in October 2017, Jensen said that Xavier can deliver 30 Teraflops at 30W.
Tesla, for example, is using a hybrid solution based on a Denver CPU and Parker GPU. Denver comes with two Denver and two A57 cores. The GPU compute part consists of 1 x Parker GPGPU with 256 CUDA cores as well as one MXM module. We could not find the proper answerof what actually is inside that MXM module and we could not find pictures of it.
Tesla S, X and 3 solutions should sit between Drive PX2 auto cruise and Drive PX2 auto-chauffeur version of the hardware.
The Drive Pegasus is a four-chip solution with two GPUs and two mobile Xavier SoCs that may well bring 200 times performance of Parker. This four-chip solution with post-Volta discrete GPUs most likely the one that many call Turing. The overall performance od Drive Pegasus lands at 320 INT8 TOPS. These are integer operation numbers.
Drive Pegasus will sample in Q3 2018 which indicates that post-Volta GPUs should be ready by that timeframe. Production will happen only a year later. This might have something to do with the initial launch date of the Drive Pegasus equipped vehicles. It looks like Pegasus will be inside what Nvidia calls Level 5 cars and that these will hit the streets in early 2020.
The one after that is called Orin and is slated to bring the performance of Pegasus in two chips.